Three Grade 8 students, Illya, Arda, and Henry, took on an exciting challenge offered by the European Space Agency (ESA) this year. Their task was to code a program to calculate the real-time speed of the International Space Station (ISS) using the sensors on an Astro Pi computer onboard the ISS.

 

During this three-month challenge, they had to develop real-world skills like learning the Python programming language and debugging their code. The project involved new material that was unfamiliar to them. “When starting this challenge, we knew very little about the movement of the ISS and almost nothing about the Astro Pi computer,” says Arda.”We began by doing extensive research and brainstorming how the ISS moves and how we could calculate this movement using the different sensors on the Astro Pi computer. After discovering a solution, we had to learn how to code, which was something we all had little experience with." Team Trojans was one of the 236 (out of 306) teams that successfully created working code, earning them the opportunity to run their program on the ISS for 10 minutes. This competition was also open to students up to 19 years old. Their program ran while the ISS was off the coast of Chile and then across a section of the Atlantic Ocean. “They had to overcome several obstacles, so they can be very proud of their efforts and accomplishment,” says Serene, Middle School Enrichment Teacher.

 

American School of The Hague (ASH) boasts a robust Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) curriculum that is fully integrated across the curriculum, exposing students to real-world learning from Pre-Kindergarten through High School. Just as these three intrepid students quite literally took their learning into space, learning at ASH is all about applying lessons beyond the classroom, whether that’s partnering with IKEA to design prototypes to improve warehouse efficiency or upgrade the infrastructure of a school in Thailand with clean energy sources like solar panels as part of a Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) trip to Thailand.