The idea of awarding prizes for the development of innovation seems to have blossomed with Charles Lindbergh, the first man to fly non-stop across the Atlantic. A man from New York named Raymond Orteig offered $25,000 to the first person who could fly non-stop across the Atlantic - in 1919.
It wasn't until 1927, after Charles Lindbergh convinced a group of businessmen from St. Louis, MO to build the right airplane, that the Orteig Prize was awarded. The XPrize, a highly incentivized prize that has a bold an audacious goal - for example, going to the moon - was developed in this spirit of boldness. The Google Lunar XPrize is a incentivized prize to promote travel to the moon. Teams of scientists are developing robots that can move around and explore the surface of the moon in order to meet the December 2016 deadline for this prize. But, wait! How is all this inspiring our 4th and 5th graders? The short answer is that we are participating in the MoonBot Challenge. The MoonBot Challenge is an online competition that challenges students ages 8-17 to think of ways that travel to the moon is important and to create, design and engineer a robot to move on the lunar surface. After conducting research on the Apollo missions to the moon, we have begun to create our teams and are working on becoming good team members.. Next week we will begin to develop our stories about the moon and finish up our team logos. |
Contact: Students at Wise School participate in technology and engineering classes each week.
We learn keyboarding, word processing, coding, robotics, engineering and more! Archives
April 2020
Categories
All
|