"Mar's Rover"??

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des
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"Mar's Rover"??

Post by des »

Hey I'm back!!!

I thought someone here might be able to help me with this. As some of you recall, I teach hands on science in a summer program, and I have started working on it. It's time consuming but fun, fun, fun.
Anyway I am going to do a Mar's Explorer "camp" program. I plan to do things like the egg drop, various mapping activities, hydroponics, a simulated Mar's mission (this was great fun last year), etc.

Quite a number of years ago I saw an activity for kids where they tried to show them the problems of communicating from the Earth to Mars using a RV car, a simulated landscape. The thing that was quite neat was there was a short time delay on the car. It made doing this frustrating and very interesting.

I have no idea how to do such a thing. I found a site where someone had rigged a video camera to a RV car. It sounds neat but the video equipment might not be available.

Basically what i was thinking of was something a bit simpler (if it could be done) and that is taking a regular RV car from Radio Schlock (perhaps with a bit of a Martian redesign :-)) and put some kind of switch in it that would give it a time delay-- if this is doable.

I'm not very good at it but I can work a soldering iron and so on.

BTW, I know there is a way of simulating this, but I might try this if it were doable. ? Perhaps if it isn't too hard, I could bribe my nephew for a couple large pizzas.



--des :)
Benji
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Post by Benji »

I did something similar where the kids were the rover. Three or four kids were blindfolded and lined up conga-style (hands on shoulders). They were lead to the beginning of an obstacle course (just tape on the ground, didn't want them to trip) and a friend in "mission control" would give them navigation instructions. Not as fancy as your idea, but they did understand some of the difficulties involved in remote vehicle operation.
Ad astra per aspera.
SpaceCanada
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Post by SpaceCanada »

Benji's idea is really similar to what I've done with kids before too. We made it more involved/difficult for older kids, introducing codes, pictures, obstacles, satellites, garbled messages, etc. Good fun.
- Jennifer -
Youth ASA 6-Day 1998 1999
Adult ASA 8-Day 2004; Alumni 2007, CSC 2013, 2015, 2017
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