Mars Challenge – unplugged computing secondary resources
The Mars Challenge secondary school resources are a set of "unplugged" computing resources, aimed at students aged 11 to 14 years old. The resources are set in the context of the European Space Agency ExoMars mission, which includes the launch and operation of the Rosalind Franklin rover to the surface of Mars.
Instruction sets, flowcharts, abstraction, logic, algorithms, binary, bitmaps, steganography, logical reasoning, creating solutions to real world-problems, and computational logic. There are also opportunities to look at space careers and other cross -curricular topics.
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Steganography
Students will understand the concept of steganography and will create a bitmap image. They will explore colour depth and know how to convert a custom image to binary. They will be able to decode binary images and use pattern recognition to identify abnormal data.
These resources are set in the context of the...
Collecting and processing samples
For this session students will work out a limited set of instructions to enable the ExoMars rover to find good locations to take samples for analysis. They will have to consider carefully what instructions the software will have to carry out to make the ExoMars rover’s hardware function effectively. They will then...
Sensors and logic
In this session students will create a logic circuit to represent a Mars rover MOT. They will identify the necessary logic gates and consider numerous inputs, which will be combined and traversed in person. They will make the link between truth tables and undertake testing and some simplification to reduce the...
Communicating data
This session will provide students with an introduction to how text is represented in binary and will enable them to explore the importance and drawbacks of compressing data. They will look into lossless and lossy data compression techniques as different approaches to compression.
These resources are set in...
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| Subject(s) | Computing |
|---|---|
| Age | 11-14 |
| Published | 2020 to date |
| Published by | |
| Collections | |
| Direct URL | https://www.stem.org.uk/cxgtr7 |
