Postcards from Mars

The Classrooms of Karin Paquin, Suzi Ring and Stephanie Millette
St. John’s Catholic School and Brunswick Jr. High, Brunswick, Maine
a STREAM Project

Take your yearlong learning and apply it in developing a Mars Colony that would sustain a minimum of 4 humans. You will utilize skills from science and math to help you design your habitat, determine what crops to grow, calculate food needed to survive until crop harvest, and maintain a suitable atmosphere inside the habitat for 4 humans. You will then apply what you have learned in religion, history, and ELA to bring this experience full circle. This project will compile all the knowledge you have learned throughout the year and allow you to test ideas in the SIMOC (Scalable, Interactive Model of an Off-world Community) simulation software. Finally, you will share this at Curriculum Night on May 24 with students, parents, and the greater school community.

As described in an April post, Karin, Suzi, and Stephanie have built an entire year of multi-disciplinary learning around the design, modeling, and testing of a Mars habitat for her middle school students. And now, just 18 hours from the final presentation, the students are preparing to share with their classmates all they have learned.

Visit the project websites Karin and Suzi and Stephanie for this incredible, dynamic program built around SIMOC and Karin’s innovative learning experience. Here is the breakdown of what her students have accomplished:

1. Pre-Mission Task: Patch Design
2. Task One: Habitat Design
3. Disciples ONLY Task Two: Getting Materials to Mars
4. Task Three: Calculating daily caloric intake and determining what crops to grow based on human caloric needs and cellular respiration
5. Task Four: Maintaining a suitable atmosphere for humans
6. Task 5: Religion: How humans will respond to being in space for so long (at St. Johns school, but not Brunswick Jr. High)
7. Task 6: Humanity: How history has played a role in the advancements in technology needed to colonize Mars
8. Task 7: 3D build colony
9. Task 8: Reflections
10. Task 9: Train Like an Astronaut
11. Task 10: Make a Playlist

Good luck! And we hope your astronauts survive!

Gretchen Hollingsworth, English Teacher, Digital Coach, and SGT Chair at Barrow Arts & Sciences Academy, Winder, Georgia writes, “Today I officially introduced SIMOC to my 10th Honors Lit class. I’ve already been talking about it for a while, but we did our first official assignment within SIMOC today. I had them learn about the “setting” of Mars and then run some simulations. Tomorrow I’m going to have my students who are in our STEM pathway help me set things up on the tech side. The rest of the students will be doing some creative writing to show how setting affects events in a story (ex. the challenges characters may face while falling in love on Mars as opposed to on Earth, etc.).

This is still part of our “engage” phase. My plan is to then transition to some more technical writing as we conduct experiments, gather data, write up lab reports, etc. We can even revisit our creative writing after learning more through our experiments or take the knowledge they’ve gained about CO2 levels in the classroom to help them advocate for recess! 😄

I’ll take lots of pics and jot notes on the process. My process is always flexible, so I usually start with a plan but fully expect it to go in a million directions, which I’m always fine with. I’ll keep you posted!”

Gretchen has been incorporating SIMOC into her classroom experiences for over a year. Learn about her initial work and more about Gretchen at her website.

The Classrooms of Karin Paquin, Suzi Ring and Stephanie Millette
St. John’s Catholic School and Brunswick Jr. High, Brunswick, Maine
a STREAM Project

The large integration project is a culmination of the student’s middle school year, showing students how each subject can be intertwined in the real world. The project begins about 4 weeks before the mission launch wherein I place students in groups, to learn to work together, to be group members. I provide roles they can play … and [give] weekly tasks to practice. One of the pre-tasks includes creating a group mission patch. These pre-tasks allow students to work out the hiccups of different personalities before beginning the Mars Colony project.

The project launches 7 weeks before the curriculum fair night where they will present their findings, 3D colony, infographics, and more to peers, other students in the school, teachers, parents, and the greater school community. The project includes broken-down tasks which include a pre-planned calendar and countdown timer to help keep them on track. They must work out disagreements and come together to agree on how they are going to accomplish all the tasks on time.

The first deliverable is their mission patch. Students [then] design a rough draft layout of their colony. They work through the brainstorming sheets provided on the SIMOC site specifically pages 16-22. This is their second deliverable for the project.

The next tasks depend on the grade. For the 7/8 graders they must complete Task 2 which is more physics focused and includes creating force diagrams for launching a payload, calculating an estimate of mission costs based on research they do about what it currently takes to ship materials to space.

The 5/6 grade group moves from Task 1 directly to Tasks 3 & 4 using the sheets provide on the SIMOC, site specifically pages 23-31. I give them the choices and have them choose four separate trials of data that they will then evaluate and adjust in the simulation. They know that they must have them pre-approved and that they are running the four simulations as they would any other lab by being sure to not change too many variables all at once.

After each simulation run, they must make slight adjustments to their variables to try to improve the outcome. The ability for students to work with the Engineering Design process through The SIMOC Mars habitat simulation brings a whole new level of learning into the classroom. It forces students to think critically and think creatively. It pushes their understanding of life on Earth to a new level while they must consider all things they would need on Mars they [may] not think about [here] on Earth.

From here students complete Tasks 5 and 6 which focus on Religion and History including questions about what makes up a civilization and how could you maintain your faith far from home. This includes deliverables 3 and 4 for the project.

Task 7 combines architectural design (ART class) with the fundamentals of the engineering design process to create a 3D model of the student’s colony design.

Task 8 has students apply what they are learning in the ELA classroom to create infographics and news articles of specific areas of their colony and a reflection of the project to date.

Task 9 takes students into the PE Classroom to train as an astronaut. Including strength, agility, cardio, and endurance.

Finally, Task 10 asks students to create the ultimate musical playlist to bring with them to their colony on Mars!

Student comments have included the following:

“It is amazing how every class is incorporated into our project.”

“It’s also fun how each person has a job that helps the team.”

“I can see it now how if our living area is too big and our greenhouse, we consume a lot of energy which can cause problems, I think less is more on Mars.”

“The mars colony STEM project is amazing. Though some tasks are hard, it is so much fun to figure out how to do them and learn more about space and colonizing Mars.”

This project summary was prepared by Karin Paquin, St. John’s Catholic School for grades 5-8 Science / Social Studies.