One small step for teachers, one giant leap for STEM education.

Sometimes it can be difficult for teachers to demonstrate real life application in their lessons, well this series of lessons can help.

Your class can run a Mars Rover mission using your LEGO® Education Ev3 MINDSTORMS® sets and the Pi3block.

Lesson 1

The Pupils will design and build a rover to explore and gather data about a newly discovered planet.

Lesson 2

Pupils will investigate the visual properties of a new planet and record observations making inferences based on the data gathered.

Lesson 3

Pupils will describe properties of planets in the Goldilocks Zone.  Students will analyse data about the temperature of planets in our solar system. In addition, they’ll investigate the temperature of a new planet and compare the temperature readings to that of other planets in our solar system.

Lesson 4

Pupils will investigate and describe solar energy and its uses.

Lesson 5

Pupils will design an experiment to answer a question about light on a new planet. Students will present their experiment idea to the class. Students will answer a question about light on the new planet by completing one of the student-designed experiments.

Why not see if your pupils can build a landscape diorama to explore in arts and crafts lessons?

The Benefits

If this series of lessons are followed even loosely, the pupils will learn about how an actual robotic space mission works, gain great knowledge about our solar system and beyond, learn about coding and programming using the same languages as our industrial robots programmers use over at Active8 Robots.  They’ll be learning how to research, how to use their mathematics for a real scenario, introductions to teamwork and managing a project. All great skills for life.  Your lessons can all be supported by masses of videos and photographs from the real world such as those on the NASA website. Why not show a launch recording and a mission control delivering their robot to Mars?

What a great way to engage your pupils and even your staff.  If you don’t yet have LEGO® Education Ev3 MINDSTORMS® sets, this lesson series will be a superb way of engaging funders, local sponsoring businesses and parent fundraisers too. Why not sign up for your free Google Workbench account and get imaginative with your STEM education?

Links

See more details of this series of lessons here:-

www.workbencheducation.com/MarsRover

See details of LEGO® Education STEM products here:-

www.active-robots.com/lego-education

See details of the Pi3Block here:-

www.active-robots.com/raspberry-pi-related/brickpi3-starter-kit

See details of LEGO® Education EV3  STEM products here:-

www.active-robots.com/lego-mindstorms-education

See details of the optional LEGO® Education Space challenge Set here:-

www.active-robots.com/lego-education/ev3-space-challenge-set

We'd love to hear and talk about what you are doing with your LEGO® Education sets, please get in touch and help us share best practices.