Bishesh (Naperville North H.S.)
Mentor: Brian Nord
This summer I worked on The Mars Rover Mission with Brian Nord. We were tasked with creating (a) Mars Rover(s) and an environment for it to operate on in such a way that the equipment would have potential for being utilized as mediums of pedagogy that complied with Next Generation Science Standards. It was an inquiry-based project for which no guidelines were given, simply the aforementioned end task and a budget with which to complete it. To get an idea of the necessary aspects of such a project, we based our project off of previous generations of Mars Rovers. In the end, the project as a whole manifested itself as an autodidactic, creative process.
The project was mainly performed on three frontiers: software, engineering and scientific. The engineering frontier consisted of constructing the rovers and environment. The scientific frontier consisted of the selection and implementation of data acquisition devices onto our rovers to perform quantitative and qualitative experiments. The software frontier consisted of fabricating an interface on the computer to control the engineered rover and monitor the scientific instruments. Upon completion of the three frontiers, we conducted a presentation and subsequent demonstration session with high school teachers for evaluation of the project's in class potential.