Future Mars Rover Engineers

St. Louis School kicked off our spring Cyber STEM After School session with a hands-on engineering exercise. Students were divided into teams and challenged to design a space lander using the engineering design process. The lander design had to keep two marshmallow "aliens" safe inside a cup as it was dropped from various heights. Prior to beginning the challenge, we reviewed the key science concepts of shock-absorption, drag forces, and stability and discussed NASA’s mission of landing a rover on Mars. Students used the four C’s (creativity, communication, collaboration, and critical thinking) to design and implement a variety of clever structures, as you can see in these photographs. Our future NASA engineers came up with some clever designs and had a lot of fun while doing so. We look forward to a successful and enlightening session! #BeaKnight #SLSSTEM