The Fort Issue 03 Jun 2019 | Page 16

HIGH SCHOOL

Ms. Maria Mora -Verdala Voyagers’ Team Leader, Comp Science Teacher

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CanSat Competition: “An extra pair of eyes in space”

When the Verdala Voyagers team met for the first time to discuss the capabilities and goals of our satellite, the first idea was to put a camera on it. The team wanted the satellite to be able to see from high up, to create the feeling that we were astronauts ourselves. Humanity has conquered the land, the water and the air; but space is the last unknown frontier. Space is an extremely hostile environment for humans and the Universe is so immense. When astronauts contemplate Earth from far away they perceive how minuscule and vulnerable our planet is, the Sagan’s pale blue dot. This is such a powerful experience that makes the astronauts come back wiser and more humble.

The process of designing and building the CanSat was very rewarding, although not an easy one. The students excelled at finding information and they were very excited to learn new skills by following procedures from the information gathered. They have learned to work with a microcontroller; they know how to solder an electrical device on a board to make it stable; they practised precise measuring, cutting, drilling and assembling to build their own antenna; and they designed, measured, cut, sewed and attached fabric to make their own parachute. I am sure those skills will be useful in other scenarios in the future - anything from building garden furniture to mending a shirt, to collaborating on the design of some future piece of software or hardware. But the difficulties appeared when there was no established procedure and they needed to innovate or invent for themselves. Those are obviously more complex ventures. They require creativity and a touch of genius as much as other non-glamorous attributes, such as patience, adaptation to constraints, acceptance of failure and grit to continue trying.

The design cycle is indeed a cycle, which implies that things need to be repeated and changed many times until they are correct. There is no shortcut in innovation and this is a new message for students. Many students are used to getting things right on the first try, as the assessments given in school have a clear outcome or solution, often driven by a deadline. For some students, failure is a dead end and our team took some weeks to accept that the opposite is true. As Thomas A. Edison said: “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” I was very proud of the Verdala Voyagers when they were bold enough to accept failure as part of their pathway to learning and success.

We know that fortune favours the bold, so many great adventures happened during the project: the excitement of having all technical aspects of the CanSat ready just the day before the launch; the experience of having your very own satellite thrown up into the air to 500 m and reaching maximum acceleration; the accomplishment felt when we received data from the radio connexion; the fear to see the live video of the CanSat descending slowly but landing in the sea; and the exulting success of being able to recover the CanSat and its data with the help of a diver. Those are some of the great experiences that the team will remember in the years to come and we are grateful to the MCST organisers for this opportunity and their support.

After this rich experience, the Verdala team came out, as real astronauts; wiser and more humble. That alone is worth all the effort they put into the project.