When it comes time to move on from the Middle School to the Upper School at Rowland Hall, students can feel as if they are entering a whole new world. It’s only fitting, then, that their final project for eighth grade required them to imagine the society they would create if they weren’t going to a different division, but to the surface of the planet Mars.

“The entire grade came together and worked to solve the challenge of a mission to Mars from a STEM perspective as well as a humanities perspective,” said science teacher Sara Donnelly. “It allowed them to take what they have learned in their three years in the Middle School and put it all together in a capstone project.”

The entire grade came together and worked to solve the challenge of a mission to Mars. ... It allowed them to take what they have learned in their three years in the Middle School and put it all together in a capstone project.—Sara Donnelly, eighth-grade science teacher

In planning this project, now in its second year, the eighth-grade team wanted to come up with something that would pique curiosity, promote collaboration, allow for creativity, and require the students to use knowledge from a variety of disciplines. Mars was the perfect destination, both for its place in the American zeitgeist and the recent uptick in interest in the space program.

“The idea of Mars colonization looms large in how we think about public science and technology in this country,” said English teacher Brady Smith. “And with the Artemis moon mission happening this year, it could be possible that people could be headed to Mars within their lifetimes.”

The project was structured as a fast design challenge. The kids had two weeks to form teams, make a plan, and flesh it out to the best of their abilities. Each day, all teams were given the same basic task but were granted plenty of leeway in how they approached it. Then, they created a comprehensive pitch presentation about their plans.

“We started with each team deciding where on Mars to set up their colony and making a physical map of the layout, then moved on to survival systems and things like that,” Sara said. “From there, they built a colony charter and established a government, and then created an artifact to represent something about their culture or life on Mars.”

The artifacts varied from group to group and displayed the values of the teams that created them. Several decided a national anthem was of utmost importance. One group decided to create a Mars hacky sack and figured out how much more the sack would have to weigh in the planet’s differing gravity. Another group created a new holiday, Supply Day, marking when Mars and Earth would be closest together and new provisions would arrive. For Annika S. and her group, a love of language was the basis for their choice.

“The artifact is a book meant to teach English by putting it side by side with the language spoken on Mars,” she said. “If you’re spending years on a planet with a bunch of people from different places, your language is bound to change. We combined Dutch, Spanish, German, and English because those were the languages we knew best.”

The students also had to work on building their interpersonal and diplomatic skills, both in the simulation and in the classroom. In their groups, the students used collaboration skills taught to them throughout their education to reach their goals. Cooperation, delegation, conflict resolution, and other skills all came into play as they tackled questions like, “How do we convince people to eat mealworms?” (a good form of protein) and “Should we build a giant statue of the founders of this colony?” When it came to Mars, they had to decide which form of government to install and how it would be accepted by those living there.

The students had to work on building their interpersonal and diplomatic skills, both in the simulation and in the classroom. In their groups, the students used collaboration skills taught to them throughout their education to reach their goals.

“There’s capitalism, which seems to be something that works, but everyone’s going to need to be pitching in to build this society,” said Charlotte B. “Communism or some kind of sharing of resources may work better, especially because it’s a small group of people to start with.”

Presentation skills came into play on the final day of the project as the students shared their colony plans to an audience posing as investors who could potentially fund their endeavors. Each team had to lay out exactly why their plan would work, what made it unique, and its future benefits. “We had to know every detail and be really organized,” said Luca T. “We went over our slide deck so many times, and made sure we all had a part and weren’t just reading off a page, but using it as a guide.”

This year, for the first time in the capstone project, the students were allowed to use artificial intelligence to help them with their work. The team decided to allow AI use to help students start to learn to use it, without becoming reliant on it. They also thought it would help the teams answer questions about what may be realistic and help with evidence-based reasoning.

“We allowed it as a sort of brainstorming and preliminary research tool, but we were very clear that everything produced had to be produced by them,” said Brady. “We wanted to see if it would affect the growth of the project or help with the depth of thinking.”

Deepening thinking, making plans, and using the knowledge gained throughout middle school to bring those plans to life were all hallmarks of the Mission to Mars project. After all, Rowland Hall may not only be developing people this world needs, but maybe the next one as well.

“We’ll expand our thinking and creativity,” said Josie K. “Because if we do go to Mars, we’ll need to think on our feet.”