With this year’s launch of the NASA Perseverance Rover to Mars, some 300,000 youth across the country will participate in October in the Mars Base Camp initiative as part of the 13th annual 4-H Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) challenge with its theme of sending humans on a mission to Mars.
“The Mars Base Camp theme is the perfect topic to engage young people and encourage them to explore a wide range of exciting subject areas related to STEM, in addition to the theme of outer space,” said Erika Bonnett, a Virginia Cooperative Extension specialist. “Extension and the nation’s land-grant universities are perfectly positioned to develop research-backed curriculum and activities that help young people learn in creative ways. These activities inspire kids to get hands-on and think about some big problems that today’s top scientists and engineers are working on.”
The National 4-H Council, Virginia Cooperative Extension and Virginia 4-H, with support from Google, designed four unique hands-on activities to get kids and teens to explore such topics as computer science and space agriculture.
The STEM challenge kicked off on Thursday, Oct. 1. Youth all across the country are invited to participate in the challenge and take part in other planned virtual events. For information about how to get involved, visit the 4-H Stem Challenge website.
Four 4-H STEM activities are planned for Thursdays in October at 7 p.m.
Oct. 8, STEM Careers: Talk to actual scientists who work on the NASA Mars projects. They will share how they got where they are today and how students, too, can have a STEM career.
Oct. 15, STEM Games: Play Pictionary, Jeopardy or other games to showcase your knowledge and skills in science, technology, engineering, agriculture, math or space.
Oct. 22, Mars Geoscientist Panel: Take part in an engaging question and answer session in which Virginia Tech geoscientists who study Mars answer questions from Virginia 4-Hers.
Oct. 29, Learning about NASA: Learn from and ask questions of people who have or are currently working at NASA. This session will give students an opportunity to learn about projects and programs that they work on and how they got the chance to work for NASA.
Virginia 4-H will also host four Mars Base Camp how-to sessions in October at 2 p.m.
Oct. 6, Red Planet Odyssey: Students will be introduced to concepts of the engineering and design process through building a rover and going on an exploratory mission to Mars.
Oct. 13, Crop Curiosity: This session will focus on learning and playing crop curiosity as students learn about growing food on Mars.
Oct. 20, Landing Zone Surveyor: Mars has one of the largest canyons in the Solar System. This session will explore things students might find if they landed on the surface of Mars and how scientists know that they are there.
Oct. 27, Insight from Mars: Students can tell their families about their trip to Mars as they learn how to code their own messages from Mars.
To kick off this year’s 4-H STEM Challenge, Bill Nye “The Science Guy,” CEO at The Planetary Society, will serve as this year’s 4-H STEM Challenge Ambassador. He will be encouraging millions of young people across the U.S. by telling them that no matter the circumstances they are facing as a result of COVID-19, they can still explore STEM and participate in hands-on learning opportunities.
