Nathan with his finished RoverOn Monday, February 16th, Dr. Paul Guttman held a fun-filled session on space probes to our solar system at Sierra Nevada College. To an audience of 20 eager participants, Paul set the stage with a short Nova video on the making of the Mars Rover. It was quite impressive the number of people and companies involved and how every piece was hand made and designed to handle extreme conditions. Because it takes 10 minutes for a signal to reach Mars from Earth, the Rover had to be programmed to handle most tasks such as navigation completely on it own - an impressive feat.

Zac with a little help...In the next part of the session, the kids and, at least, one adult had an opportunity to make their own Rover to give them a sense of what was required. Paul used a model that he had built to demonstrate the basic design but how they built their Rovers was up to them. Marshmallows, chocolate bars, candy drops and toothpicks made up some of the construction materials - although we suspect that not all of the chocolate made it into their Rovers. The creativity that they demonstrated was simply phenomenal and it also was a great parent-child team building activity as well.

Connor presenting his Rover to the groupAfter the Rovers were built, each team presented to the larger group the design of their space probe and what each one was designed to research. By the end, the list was quite extensive and included some interesting possibilities such as studying bacteria on Mars. The kids were quite knowledgeable and participated fully in the question and answer period.

Click here to see more photos from the event.