Mission Control

2020

Mission Control is a program developed by Mike Beach, Sal Mancini, and I at Artisan’s Asylum. This program was initially created in spring of 2020 just as the world shut down as a way we could deliver hands on summer programming to middle school aged students remotely. I came up with the idea that the 3 instructors are on Mars and the students are mission control who have to solve problems the astronauts run into. These problems ended up taking a few forms. Sal lead a design workshop to create a geodesic dome habitat for the Mars base. Students learned a bit of CAD in sketchup and some manual fabrication skills to trace, cut and assemble a model dome from card stock and clear sheet plastic. Mike and I worked closely together to develop a robotics platform based on the open source MeArm. We combined parts from the laser cut original and a 3d printed remix to create a kit that was faster and easier to produce and assemble.

Mike created a custom PCB to breakout the pads on an Adafruti Circuit Playground to run 4 servos.

We walked the students through assembling the kit and as we went taught them some basic programming using MakeCode a Scratch like block programming environment. Once they had working robot arms we gave the students missions such as building a platform that their model astronaut could stand on while being lifted by the robot arm to install an antenna on the roof of their dome. You can see what the students made in the video above.

2021

We revamped the program for 2021 and decided to ditch the robot arm. It was still too fiddly to assemble and difficult to debug remotely. We kept the circuit playground and breakout board and I designed some laser cut brackets and wheels to mount a servo into a custom creation. We decided to learn more into the prototyping and iteration aspects of design and let the students imaginations run wild with what they could build with the tools we gave them. They learned to make the lights, speaker, and servos on the circuit playground respond to the buttons, microphone, light, or temperature sensors. Instead of the astronauts saying we need this specific thing we let the students say if they were stuck on Mars what would they want to have for science, entertainment, or quality of life.

I built a rocket launch system. If I was stuck on Mars I would want a way back home.

This student built a Mars Car so he could go exploring.