STEAM with MIT

It's been a busy few weeks in STEAM we’ve released the latest MIT Home Lab, which this time focuses on designing the perfect paper airplane and building a launcher for testing. We’ve also seen the release of the latest Code Breaker activity, which looks at modern day encryption and is the final practice activity ahead of the Code Breaker Murder Mystery going live at the start of February. These activities, as well as the ongoing Elevator Engineer task and previous activities from Term 1 have been a great success and all can be found in the STEAM area of Global Campus.

As we start to approach landing day for the Mars Perseverance Rover (February 18^th) we are getting very excited. NASA is preparing for human exploration of Mars, and MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment) will help future explorers produce oxygen from the Martian atmosphere for breathing and propellant for travel (like coming home to Earth!). MOXIE makes oxygen like a tree does: by inhaling carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen. But Mars is a very, very dusty place. To make oxygen on Mars all that dust must be filtered out of the carbon dioxide. MIT Professor Jeffrey Hoffman has challenged NAE students worldwide to learn all they can about filters and design the best filter for MOXIE to produce oxygen for humans on Mars.