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Kids' mission: Fun, education and life on Mars
By LOGAN D. MABE © St. Petersburg Times, published May 25, 2001 TAMPA -- Two Tampa elementary schools, with no assistance from NASA, launched a joint mission to Mars on Thursday afternoon and successfully established a community of clever fifth-graders on the Red Planet. "We're colonizing Mars here," said Tampa Palms Elementary fifth-grade teacher Michelle Carmen, the mission controller. "They're going to build a whole world in one afternoon." "Here" was the two-story auditorium at the Museum of Science and Industry where 110 students from Tampa Palms and Independent Day School converged to construct a Mars habitat in six inflatable rooms. Building a working space station out of discarded household materials was the culmination of six weeks of study of the planet. Students broke into teams to work on five facilities that would serve the various needs of people living on Mars. The museum offers the curriculum to area schools. They included health and recreation, habitat support, life support, science and technology, and a communications center. The sixth, a "Grand Hall," was devoted to creating the colony's government, complete with laws, a flag, a monument, a constitution and currency. Each team, composed of students from both schools, was responsible for one aspect of life that would face future visitors to Mars. "We're going to build a facility that can store all the information we collect about the planet," said IDS student Corey Fernandez, a member of the science and technology team. "We'll research weather and the effects of being in a no-gravity situation on the mental aspect of psychology." Fellow IDS student Ian Foe explained that they planned to use "basic scrap material to try and build different machines. We basically build anything and everything that's new. Robots, jet packs, stuff like that." For weeks, the students had brainstormed what they would need. They had researched what Mars conditions are like and what they would need to overcome them. They drew elaborate diagrams of things they planned to design and build. On paper, it all seemed to make sense. Then, the teachers let the colonists loose on the Mountain of Materials to be used in building theirs New World. Kids formed flying beelines, swooping in for armloads of materials and scurrying back to their domed dens. Carmen said she sent home fliers to the kids' parents with about 200 suggestions of household items the kids could use to build their models. What came back was an avalanche of golf balls, dry pasta, rubber bands, cotton swabs, clothespins, cardboard boxes, paper towel rolls, PCV piping, plastic milk cartons, pots and pans, huge bags of packing peanuts, coat hangers and foam cushions. And lots and lots of packing tape and glue guns to hold it all together. In the Grand Hall, Vinay Rao of Tampa Palms Elementary was putting together a mass of plastic foam with tape that would become the colony's Washington Monument. "This is supposed to be an astronaut," Vinay said. "It's supposed to be a monument to our space mission." Nearby, IDS student Monica Shah was helping put together a flag representing the five countries (Canada, France, Japan, Russia and the United States) involved in the mission. Asked whether she might one day see such a mission materialize on Mars, Monica was optimistic. "I hope it happens," she said. "The way it's going, it looks like it will. We're thinking ahead that it will happen." At the end of the day, the students conducted tours of their habitats and explained how it all worked -- even if some of their creations seemed to defy explanation. -- Logan D. Mabe can be reached at (813) 226-3464.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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