Ambigo's Mission to Mars

What would it be like to live on another planet? This question inspired great exploration for Ambigo in the final two weeks of the By Air Arc. Students worked on teams to design and build a habitat that was a third the size it would need to be to keep all of us alive on Mars. We set our constraints based on the recent announcement from Elon Musk’s plans for getting to Mars in 80 days. Each team had their own research to do and piece of the habitat to build. Teams covered hydrology, climate, human resources, site facilities, and communications.Students wrote reflections on the process of tackling such a big project in our final week of the By Air Arc. Here's an excerpt from Audrey's reflection:We wanted to make the HAB as realistic as possible. A lot of research and math went into that and I think we did a pretty good job. I also thought it was cool that when using the HAB we tried to make sure that the two airlock doors were never open at the same time because if it was a real HAB, and both airlock doors were open at the same time, all the air would rush out and everyone would die. I think my favorite part of the project was the very last day when we had to connect everything together and finish everything in one day (it was also pretty stressful). It was really cool to see everything we had worked on for the last week suddenly come together. Some of my favorite moments in that day were cutting the plastic between the cardboard rings and seeing the newly connected room on the other side.  I think I learned a lot from this project. I learned for one thing that I need to get better at planning out a whole project rather than just planning the first couple days. I also learned that some tasks that seem so big will turn out to be not as hard as you think. We made a HAB in ONE week. That still sounds a little impossible to me. I’m really happy with what came out of this and I can’t wait to see what we do next.This week we're kicking off the By Land Arc by looking at traditions. After spending a week  in Mendocino, a beautiful Brightworks tradition, we're considering what traditions we want to carry over from Arc 1 into Arc 2. We'll also be taking a field trip to the Oakland Museum of California to look at some rich Bay Area traditions. We're still thinking of ways we may continue to explore the movement of things by land on the Red Planet, and how we will keep up traditions new and old throughout the second Arc.