It’s more than a little crowded in a West Chicago 6th-grade classroom these days. Smack in the middle of the room is a mock water filtration plant.
Constructed of drinking straws and aluminum foil and accompanied by a big-wheeled robotic crane, the contraption looms over a wrinkled and reddish-colored alien surface and represents the students’ fascination with exploring other worlds.
Specifically, the children are studying manned travel to Mars in 2030. In fact, throughout Turner Elementary School in West Chicago District 33, evidence of the Red Planet is visible in nearly every corner. There are maps, posters and even globes of Mars. A banner over a ceiling-to-floor photo asks, “Will We Live Here Someday?”
So it is no wonder that when Michelle Nichols, an educator at the Adler Planetarium, showed up the other day toting a satchel full of Mars-like rocks and stories about what conditions on Mars are like, curious kids surrounded her with hands waving like a forest of palm fronds.
The purpose of Nichols’ visit was to help the pupils learn more about Mars for the Mars Millennium Project in which schoolchildren the nation over are designing a habitat that would sustain a human colony on Mars. The program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, NASA and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. Its goal is not only to teach kids about Mars but to get them excited about science.
Turner Elementary is one of 45 schools in Illinois participating in the Mars Millennium Project, which will culminate in an exhibit at Adler Planetarium in May where participating schools can showcase their creations. In all, about 3,000 students in Illinois are involved.
“We didn’t provide them with a blueprint of what they had to do. We said, `Here’s some ideas, here’s some facts about Mars,’ ” Nichols said. “And it’s incredible what the schools have come up with.”
In nearby Munhall School in St. Charles, for example, after-school groups of pupils are working hard. A girls group is writing and performing in a television newscast that will be presented as a broadcast from Mars. A boys group has created Craterville, a community that includes everything from a running track to a water pond with fish.
“The Mars program is a real incentive to students and it has captured educators, and schools have run with it,” said Turner Principal Sue Wulff, who has a couple of bags of NASA-issued, freeze-dried ice cream in the bottom of a desk drawer. She was so taken with the Mars program that she also serves as a parent adviser to the Munhall School after-school projects.
But it is the children who are coming up with most of the ideas. They “have been real creative,” she said.
In recent weeks, pupils have wrestled with thorny problems such as how to get water (look for it by drilling into the ground) and oxygen (build plastic bubbles over their buildings and wear spacesuits). They’ve pondered how to entertain themselves for the 10-month space flight (take games and household pets) and how to stay warm on a planet where temperatures can be hundreds of degrees below zero (go underground).
They have invented all sorts of interesting solutions. In the Turner library, a place of honor has been given to a cardboard mockup of Mars Elementary School, its playground covered with a clear protective bubble.
Pupil essays describe how rap music will become zap music, how rock ‘n’ roll will become alien rock, how the blues will become red music. Bags of simulated Martian soil are handed from teacher to teacher for show-and-tell.
Turner pupils seemed to get even more inspired during Nichols’ visit as they reviewed what they had studied: that Mars is nicknamed the Red Planet because it appears to be dark red, a result of the dust storms that contain large deposits of iron; that Mars has a third of the gravity of Earth; and that the U.S. in recent months lost contact with two Mars explorer spaceships.
Nichols also was bombarded with questions from the kids who wanted to know whether hypersleep is really a part of space travel (answer, no.) to are there aliens (answer, not as far as we know.)
Nichols said she was impressed with the work the kids had done. After her presentation, she walked down the hall to take a look at the pupil-created water plant and watched kids poking strips of foil into clear drinking straws to make the shiny ribs that hold up their building.
Her sage pronouncement: “Real cool.”
