ESA Astro Pi Mission Zero – Mentoring 6th Graders🛰️

Mission Zero offers young people the chance to have their code run in space! Students shall write a simple Python program to take a reading from the colour and luminosity sensor on an Astro Pi computer on board the International Space Station, and use it to set the background colour in a personalised image for the astronauts to see as they go about their daily tasks. [source: official Mission Zero website]

In addition, we presented the eager-to-learn 6th graders with an Astro Pi Mission Space Lab kit, and also taught them how to measure the temperature, pressure, and humidity with the help of the Raspberry Pi’s respective sensors. What is more, we had the wonderful chance of presenting our previous Astro Pi Mission Space Lab project, and saw their excitement, participating in their first international ESA project.

This being my very first experience mentoring (hopefully of many more to come 🙂 ), I was delighted to see how interested the kids were, and I was also quite nostalgic, thinking about the time when I was in their shoes, an excited 6th grader doing the exact same project under the guidelines of more experienced high school students and our amazing Physics teacher, Ioana Stoica.

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