At the end of August (2019), NASA announced the
Name The Rover Essay Contest. The contest is open to grades K-12 and is a great opportunity to meld STEM with a little English Language Arts with a writing component and a little Social Studies with a bit of a history component (if you've ever wondered how NASA names its rockets, rovers, spaceships, etc. throughout history).
The contest entry deadline is November 1st, 2019. (That's 37 days away from the date of this blog post.) The rover is slated to be launched this summer 2020 and land February 2021.
Here is a short video you can watch of the Mars Rover being built in a cleanroom.
There is a great list of lessons and resources which can be found here:
Future Engineers: Name the Rover Challenge. It is worth mentioning that Future Engineers is a website that hosts
several types of engineering challenges. If you register as a teacher, you'll gain access to challenges as they are made available, and you'll be able to create your own classes on the website to assign challenges too. This will share the challenge and all of its curated resources with each student for you to track their progress through the challenge. Once you've registered, you can set up your classes in your dashboard which will give you an access code to register your students. You'll find the parent permission form available both in email and printable form to save you time! Students can submit through their class portal or you can submit for them from the dashboard.
If you'd like some information about the history of naming spacecraft to help you and/or your students as you start this challenge, here are a few links below:
Good luck!
