Have you ever wondered how we communicate with spacecraft that are far from Earth? It's time to find out! How? By creating our own space game.
Radio waves and the Micro:bit will be our main "tools" for understanding and simulating space communication. We will introduce the main characters of our game—the radio antenna, the spaceship, and the radio waves—into the Scratch environment and program them.
The next stop is the Main Asteroid Belt. Our mission is to locate the largest asteroids and “prevent” them from hitting Earth. The journey continues with a visit to Jupiter and Saturn, where we’ll “take” lots of photos and send them back to Earth. Finally, we'll learn what happens to spacecraft when they get old, and we'll create the game's ending.
The goal of this space mission is threefold: An introduction to radio waves, well-known space missions, asteroids, and the planets of our solar system, an introduction to and practice with basic programming commands (variables, control structures, loop structures, creating clones, etc.), and playing with the Micro:bit using a remote control!
Educational content:
- Introduction to concepts in physics, astronomy, and space exploration, such as radio waves, well-known space missions, asteroids, and planets.
- Programming in the Scratch environment.
- Introduction to the micro:bit microcontroller.
Additional material:
Scratch online platform
micro:bit online platform
NASA's Deep Space Network
Related material from the Eugenides Foundation:
Performance: Beyond Earth
Space Series E9: Windows on the Universe
Space Series E11: Life in the Solar System
Article: Space Invaders
Article: The Asteroid Belt
Planetarium Digital Library