Extension: Other “Around the Moon” Challenges FP7e

The Moon Challenge seems to have acted as a stimulus to student imagination. I particularly remember a boy student was extremely enthusiastic about his “super-dooper secret spy robot”. It left Earth in the opposite direction to everyone else’s robots, heading away from the Moon. His reasoning was that anyone on Earth would think his robot would be going to Mars or Venus. What his robot was actually going to do, he said, was to go around the Moon and spy on a “secret enemy base” on the far side of the Moon, a base which we could not see from Earth (this was well before the Chinese landing on the far side of the Moon). He knew that people on Earth only ever see about one half of the Moon, and that no one on Earth can see anything on the far side of the Moon when they are standing on the Earth. This is not widely known, but he knew it! He then taught his Robot to return past the Earth, turn around in Space, and then come back to the Earth from his “Mars or Venus” direction, so that no-one on Earth would know where he had been spying! He was very proud of his super-dooper secret spy robot, and he completed his version of this Challenge quite satisfactorily – to the applause of the other students…

How many ways can you teach your Fusion Robot to “Go around the Moon”? Perhaps inspiration can be gained from these old videos of previous student attempts using different robots. The runs vary from excellent to disastrous innovative! ?

Videos – Web – Web