The journey to space for two special 1909影视基地 Pi computers

Today’s launch is the culmination of a huge piece of work we’ve done for the European Space Agency to get the new Astro Pi units ready to become part of the European Astro Pi Challenge.

After lift-off from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the new Astro Pi units are currently travelling on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Dragon 2 spacecraft, the module atop the rocket. You can watch the launch again here.

Also travelling with our Astro Pi units are food and some Christmas presents for the astronauts on board the ISS, materials for a study of the delivery of cancer drugs; a bioprinter for experiments investigating wound healing; and materials for a study of how detergents work in microgravity.

The Dragon 2 spacecraft will berth with the ISS tomorrow, with NASA astronauts Raja Chari and Tom Marshburn monitoring its arrival. ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer and another colleague will be there to unpack its cargo. You can watch the process of unpacking tomorrow, Wed 22 December, at 8.30am GMT / 9.30am CET. In the new year, Matthias will be switching our Astro Pi units on and getting them ready to run the code written by young people participating in the European Astro Pi Challenge. The new Astro Pi units will replace Astro Pi units Ed and Izzy, which have been on the ISS for 6 years — ever since the very first Astro Pi Challenge with British ESA astronaut Tim Peake in 2015.

We’re looking forward to seeing the amazing experiments this year’s Astro Pi Mission Space Lab teams will perform on the new hardware, and what they’ll discover about life on Earth and in space. We also can’t wait to see what the young people participating in Astro Pi Mission Zero will name the new Astro Pi units!

Building space-ready Astro Pi units

None of us on the team working on the Astro Pi Challenge here at the 最大胆裸体人体牲交免费 are aerospace engineers. While building the new Astro Pi units, we’ve learned so much.

To get the Astro Pis ready to be loaded onto the rocket has been a project of more than three years. That’s because, in addition to manufacturing the Astro Pi units, we also had to ensure they pass the necessary safety and certification process. The official name for this is the Safety Gate process. It’s been set up by ESA and NASA to ensure that any items sent to the ISS are safe to operate on board the station.

For the three separate safety panels the Astro Pi units needed to get through, we put the units through different tests and completed various safety reports. The tests included:

• A vibration test: To make sure the Astro Pi units survive the rigours of the launch, we tested them using the sophisticated rigs at Airbus in Portsmouth. These rigs are capable of simulating the vibrations produced by various different launch vehicles. We needed to test all possible options, because the Astro Pi units didn’t have a confirmed vehicle to travel to the ISS yet.

• A thermal test: To make sure no harm can possibly come to the crew from the Astro Pi units, we needed to check that the touch temperature of the Astro Pi units’ surface is never above 45°C.

• A test for sharp edges: Each Astro Pi unit also needed to be manually inspected by someone wearing a latex glove who carefully feels the case for sharp edges.

• Stringent, military-grade electromagnetic emissions and susceptibility tests: These are required to guarantee that the Astro Pi units won’t interfere with any ISS systems, and that the units themselves are not affected by other equipment on board.

• We built two additional Astro Pi units and sent them to NASA so that they could test that plugging the units into the ISS power grid wouldn’t cause a power overload. 

For almost all of these tests, we created custom software to do things like stress the Astro Pi units’ processors, saturate the network links, and generally make the units work as hard as possible. 

To accompany these safety and test reports, we also had to create the Flight Safety Data Package (FSDP), which contains exact technical information about every component of the Astro Pi hardware, and about all the necessary safety controls to qualify the use of certain materials and safely manage operation of the units. The current FSDP paperwork stands at over 700 pages, which thankfully we haven’t had to actually print out!

Young people’s code will run on the new Astro Pi units next year — is yours on board?

All of this work culminated today in the Astro Pis being launched up into space from Cape Canaveral. And we’re doing all this so that more young people can take part in the European Astro Pi Challenge and send messages to the ISS astronauts using code as part of Mission Zero, or write code for new, ambitious experiments to run on the ISS as part of Mission Space Lab.

Young people can take part in Astro Pi Mission Zero right now! Mission Zero is a beginners’ coding activity for all young people under the age of 19 in ESA member and associate states. It gives them the chance to write code to show their own message to the astronauts on board the ISS using the Astro Pi units. And this time, Mission Zero participants can also vote to name the new Astro Pi units!

To participate, young people follow our step-by-step instructions to write their Mission Zero code. As an adult supporting a young person on Mission Zero, all you need to do is sign up as a mentor to get them a registration code for their Mission Zero entry. Once your young person’s code has run in space, we’ll send you a special certificate for them showing where the ISS, and the Astro Pi computers, were when their code ran.

Inspire a young person to learn about coding and space science today with Astro Pi Mission Zero!

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This time we are delighted to tell you that we’re upgrading the 1909影视基地 Pi computers on the International Space Station (ISS) and adding new hardware to expand the range of experiments that young people can run in space!

What’s new with Astro Pi?

The first Astro Pi units were taken up to the ISS by British ESA astronaut Tim Peake in December 2015 as part of the Principia mission. Since then, 54000 young people from 26 countries have written code that has run on these specially augmented 1909影视基地 Pi computers.

Working with our partners at the European Space Agency, we are now upgrading the Astro Pi units to include:

• 1909影视基地 Pi 4 Model B with 8GB RAM
• 1909影视基地 Pi High Quality Camera
• Google Coral machine learning accelerator
• Colour and luminosity sensor
• Passive infrared sensor
  

The units will continue to have a gyroscope; an accelerometer; a magnetometer; and humidity, temperature, and pressure sensors.

The new hardware makes it possible for teams to design new types of experiments. With the 1909影视基地 Pi High Quality Camera they can take sharper, more detailed images, and, for the first time, teams will be able to get full-colour photos of the beauty of Earth from space. This will also enable teams to investigate plant health thanks to the higher-quality optical filter in conjunction with the IR-sensitive camera. Using the Coral machine learning accelerator, teams will also be able to develop machine learning models that allow high-speed, real-time processing.

Getting into space

The Astro Pi units, in their space-ready cases of machined aluminium, will travel to the ISS in December on the SpaceX Dragon Cargo rocket, launching from Kennedy Space Center. Once the resupply vehicle docks with the ISS, the units will be unpacked and set up ready to run Astro Pi participants’ code in 2022.

Getting the units ready for launch has been a significant effort from lots of people. Once we worked with our friends at ESA to agree on the new features and hardware, we commissioned the design of the new case from Jon Wells. Manufacturing was made significantly more challenging by the pandemic, not least because we weren’t able to attend the factory and had to interact over video calls.

Once we had the case and hardware ready, we could take on the huge battery of tests that are required before any equipment can be used on the ISS. These included the vibration test, to ensure that the Astro Pi units would survive the rigours of the launch; thermal testing, to make sure that units wouldn’t get too hot to touch; and stringent, military-grade electromagnetic emissions and susceptibility tests to guarantee that the Astro Pi computers wouldn’t interfere with any ISS systems, and would not themselves be affected by other equipment that is on board the space station.

Huge thanks to Jon Wells and our collaborators at Airbus, Google, MidOpt, and Shearline Precision Engineering for everything they’ve done to get us to the point where we were able to ship the new Astro Pi units to the Aerospace Logistics Technology Engineering Company (ALTEC) in Italy for final preparations before their launch.

There are two Astro Pi missions for young people to choose from: Mission Zero and Mission Space Lab. Young people can participate in one or both of the missions! Participation is free and open for young people up to age 19 in ESA member states (exceptions listed on the Astro Pi website).

Mission Zero

In Mission Zero, young people write a simple Python program that takes a sensor reading and displays a message on the LED screen. This year, participation in Mission Zero also gives young people the opportunity to vote for the names of the two new computers. Mission Zero can be completed in around an hour and is open to anyone up to age 19. (Young children may need support with typing to do the coding activity.) Every eligible entry is guaranteed to run on board the ISS, and participants will receive an official certificate with the exact time and location of the ISS when their program ran.

Mission Zero opens today and runs until 18 March 2022.

Mission Space Lab

Mission Space Lab is for teams of young people who want to run their own scientific experiments on the Astro Pi units aboard the ISS. It runs over eight months in four phases, from idea registration to data analysis. 

Have a look at the winning teams from last year for amazing examples of what teams have investigated in the past. But remember — the new Astro Pi computers offer exciting new ways of investigating life in space and on Earth. We can’t wait to see what ideas participants come up with this year. 

To start, Mission Space Lab team mentors just need to send us their team’s experiment idea by 29 October 2021.

Follow our progress

You can keep updated with all of the latest Astro Pi news, including the build-up to the rocket launch in December, by following the Astro Pi Twitter account.

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As our 最大胆裸体人体牲交免费 CEO Philip outlined back in April, part of our response to the pandemic and social distancing measures is to send free 1909影视基地 Pi computers to students who currently lack the technology to complete their school work at home. Generously funded by the Bloomfield Trust, we have started to distribute 1909影视基地 Pis in the UK.

Who is receiving 1909影视基地 Pis?

Our approach for this initiative is to work with partner charities that help us identify the right recipients for the computers; we want them to go to young people who don’t have a suitable device for completing their schoolwork in their home.

The first partner charity we’ve been working with, whose team has been so patient as we’ve learned together how to do this, are the incredible School Home Support, a youth organisation working to improve school attendance, behaviour, and engagement in learning. With their help, we’ve so far distributed more than 120 1909影视基地 Pi 4 computers (with 2GB RAM), together with all the peripherals including a screen. School Home Support were also able to secure funding to provide high-speed internet access to the recipients’ home so students can reliably connect to their schools.

How are we helping them set up?

The young people set up their 1909影视基地 Pis themselves, and we provide detailed instructions to guide them through this process. Most of the families have never used a computer like 1909影视基地 Pi, so they need encouragement and support to get up and running. This is being provided both by the excellent School Home Support practitioners, and by 1909影视基地 Pi team members, who answer questions when recipients get stuck.

“My mum was confused by the setup at first, but having a call to explain it really helped, and now we see how easy it is to set up and use.”

1909影视基地 Pi recipient

Recipients are already benefiting

Before receiving these computers, many of the young people only had occasional access to their parents’ phone to find out what school work had been set for them, and to complete it.

“It’s much easier to do my schoolwork now on the bigger screen. I feel like I’m learning more.”

1909影视基地 Pi recipient

We’re getting feedback that the 1909影视基地 Pis help recipients focus on their work; they now have their own space to work in and more time to complete schoolwork, as they’re no longer rushing to share a device with other family members.

“I don’t always enjoy doing homework, but it’s better now that I have my own computer to do my work.”

1909影视基地 Pi recipient

Having a 1909影视基地 Pi has increased the students’ motivation, and it has reduced stress — for parents as well as children:

“The 1909影视基地 Pi kit came at a time when I really needed it. Up until that point, T had to do his homework and access the school’s home learning using my phone, which was not very practical at all. This was made worse by the fact that he had to share my phone with his sister, which ended up causing a lot of arguments. He was so pleased to receive a computer he could use. At first he had a lot of fun playing different games on it, and I was surprised about how well he was able to understand and help me set it up. The only negative was that he enjoyed playing games on it a bit too much! I feel relieved that he has his own computer which he can use. It was very stressful and frustrating having to use my mobile phone. There were times when T would be using my phone to do his work and he would be interrupted if I got a phone call, which meant that he would have to log in again, and sometimes would lose his work.”

Parent of a 1909影视基地 Pi recipient

What are we doing next?

It’s wonderful to hear stories like this of how our computers make a difference in people’s lives. We’re still learning lots: while many families have been able to get up and running easily and quickly, others are still overwhelmed because they are unfamiliar with the device. We know we need to do more to build their confidence.

As we’re learning, we’re also talking to our next charity partners in the UK to help us identify more recipients, and to help the recipients get set up on their new 1909影视基地 Pi devices.

If you are part of an organisation that could partner with us to support families in need of access to technology, please email us at stayconnected@精品日本一区二区三区在线观看.org. Be aware that your organisation would need to fund the families’ internet access.

* The impact of the digital divide on students has for example been reported on by BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT and by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

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That’s why during his time aboard the International Space Station for the Principia mission, Tim was involved in the deployment of two Astro Pis, special 1909影视基地 Pi computers that have been living on the ISS ever since, making it possible for us to run our annual European Astro Pi Challenge.

Tim spoke about the European Astro Pi Challenge at today’s award ceremony

Thank you, Major Tim

Tim played a huge part in the first Astro Pi Challenge, and he has helped us spread the word about Astro Pi and the work of the xxxvideoeshd ever since.

Earlier this year, Tim was awarded the 2019 Royal Academy of Engineering Rooke Award for his work promoting engineering to the public, following a nomination by 1909影视基地 Pi co-founder and Fellow of the Academy Pete Lomas. Pete says:

“As part of Tim Peake’s Principia mission, he personally spearheaded the largest education and outreach initiative ever undertaken by an ESA astronaut. Tim actively connects space exploration with the requirement for space engineering.

As a founder of 1909影视基地 Pi, I was thrilled that Tim acted as a personal ambassador for the Astro Pi programme. This gives young people across Europe the opportunity to develop their 1909影视基地 skills by writing computer programs that run on the specially adapted 1909影视基地 Pi computers onboard the ISS.” – Pete Lomas

Today, Tim received the Rooke Award in person, at a celebratory event held at the Science Museum in London.

Royal Academy of Engineering CEO Dr Hayaatun Sillem presents Tim with the 2019 Rooke Award for public engagement with engineering, in recognition of his nationwide promotion of engineering and space

Four hundred young people got to attend the event with him, including two winning Astro Pi teams. Congratulations to Tim, and congratulations to those Astro Pi winners who got to meet a real-life astronaut!

Astro Pi is going from strength to strength

Since Tim’s mission on the ISS, the Astro Pi Challenge has evolved, and in collaboration with ESA Education, we now offer it in the form of two missions for young people every year:

• Mission Zero, which allows young people to write a short Python programme to display a message to the astronauts aboard the ISS. This mission can be completed in an afternoon, all eligible entries are guaranteed to run in space, and you can submit entries until 20 March 2020. More about Astro Pi: Mission Zero
• Mission Space Lab, which challenges teams of young people to design and create code to run a scientific experiment aboard the ISS using the Astro Pis’ sensors. This mission is competitive and runs over eight months, and you need to send in your team’s experiment idea by 25 October 2019. More about Astro Pi: Mission Space Lab

If you’re thinking “I wish this sort of thing had been around when I was young…”

…then help the young people in your life participate! Mission Zero is really simple and requires no prior coding knowledge, neither from you, nor from the young people in your team. Or your team could take part in Mission Space Lab — you’ve still got 10 days to send us your team’s experiment idea! And then, who knows, maybe your team will get to meet Tim Peake one day… or even become astronauts themselves!

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An Astro Pi takes photos of the earth from the window of the International Space Station

The Challenge has two missions: Mission Zero and Mission Space Lab. The more advanced one, Mission Space Lab, invites teams of students and young people under 19 years of age to enter by submitting an idea for a scientific experiment to be run on the Astro Pi units.

ESA and the xxxvideoeshd would like to congratulate all the teams that participated in the European Astro Pi Challenge this year. A record-breaking number of more than 15000 people, from all 22 ESA Member States as well as Canada, Slovenia, and Malta, took part in this year’s challenge across both Mission Space Lab and Mission Zero!

Eleven teams have won Mission Space Lab 2018–2019

After designing their own scientific investigations and having their programs run aboard the International Space Station, the Mission Space Lab teams spent their time analysing the data they received back from the ISS. To complete the challenge, they had to write a short scientific report discussing their results and highlighting the conclusions of their experiments. We were very impressed by the quality of the reports, which showed a high level of scientific merit.

We are delighted to announce that, while it was a difficult task, the Astro Pi jury has now selected eleven winning teams, as well as highly commending four additional teams. The eleven winning teams won the chance to join an exclusive video call with ESA astronaut Frank De Winne. He is the head of the European Astronaut Centre in Germany, where astronauts train for their missions. Each team had the once-in-a-lifetime chance to ask Frank about his life as an astronaut.

And the winners are…

Firewatchers from Post CERN HSSIP Group, Portugal, used a machine learning method on their images to identify areas that had recently suffered from wildfires.

Go, 3.141592…, Go! from IES Tomás Navarro Tomás, Spain, took pictures of the Yosemite and Lost River forests and analysed them to study the effects of global drought stress. They did this by using indexes of vegetation and moisture to assess whether forests are healthy and well-preserved.

Les Robotiseurs from Ecole Primaire Publique de Saint-André d’Embrun, France, investigated variations in Earth’s magnetic field between the North and South hemispheres, and between day and night.

TheHappy.Pi from I Liceum Ogólnokształcące im. Bolesława Krzywoustego w Słupsku, Poland, successfully processed their images to measure the relative chlorophyll concentrations of vegetation on Earth.

AstroRussell from Liceo Bertrand Russell, Italy, developed a clever image processing algorithm to classify images into sea, cloud, ice, and land categories.

Les Puissants 2.0 from Lycee International de Londres Winston Churchill, United Kingdom, used the Astro Pi’s accelerometer to study the motion of the ISS itself under conditions of normal flight and course correction/reboost maneuvers.

Torricelli from ITIS “E.Torricelli”, Italy, recorded images and took sensor measurements to calculate the orbital period and flight speed of the ISS followed by the mass of the Earth using Newton’s universal law of gravitation.

ApplePi from I Liceum Ogólnokształcące im. Króla Stanisława Leszczyńskiego w Jaśle, Poland, compared their images from Astro Pi Izzy to historical images from 35 years ago and could show that coastlines have changed slightly due to erosion or human impact.

Spacethon from Saint Joseph La Salle Pruillé Le Chétif, France, tested their image-processing algorithm to identify solid, liquid, and gaseous features of exoplanets.

Stithians Rocket Code Club from Stithians CP School, United Kingdom, performed an experiment comparing the temperature aboard the ISS to the average temperature of the nearest country the space station was flying over.

Vytina Aerospace from Primary School of Vytina, Greece, recorded images of reservoirs and lakes on Earth to compare them with historical images from the last 30 years in order to investigate climate change.

Highly commended teams

We also selected four teams to be highly commended, and they will receive a selection of goodies from ESA Education and the xxxvideoeshd:

Aguere Team from IES Marina Cebrián, Spain, investigated variations in the Earth’s magnetic field due to solar activity and a particular disturbance due to a solar coronal hole.

Astroraga from CoderDojo Trento, Italy, measured the magnetic field to investigate whether astronauts can still use a compass, just like on Earth, to orient themselves on the ISS.

Betlemites from Escoles Betlem, Spain, recorded the temperature on the ISS to find out if the pattern of a convection cell is different in microgravity.

Rovel In The Space from Scuola secondaria I grado A.Rosmini ROVELLO PORRO(Como), Italy, executed a program that monitored the pressure and would warn astronauts in case space debris or micrometeoroids collided with the ISS.

The next edition is not far off!

ESA and the xxxvideoeshd would like to invite all school teachers, students, and young people to join the next edition of the challenge. Make sure to follow updates on the Astro Pi website and Astro Pi Twitter account to look out for the announcement of next year’s Astro Pi Challenge!

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Fun fact: when we launched the badge, it became the very first one to feature the new Scouts logo.

More resources!

Since then, we’ve been developing resources for more stages of the badge, and we’ve just released activities to support more of stage 2 and stage 3.

https://twitter.com/UKScouting/status/1063060367960616960

Because the Digital Maker badge is a staged activity badge, any section of the Scouts movement can tackle it. And since an activity that interests and engages a Beaver is likely to be quite different to one that engages an Explorer Scout, we’ve increased the variety of activities we’re providing.

More tech!

The first set of activity resources we released either needed no technology or laptops only, as the leaders we spoke to told us it shouldn’t be too difficult to get hold of some laptops for a session. For the new resources, we’ve increased the variety of tech that we recommend using. Some of the activities use the micro:bit, since it’s a low-cost, easy-to-use bit of tech. For leaders unfamiliar with the micro:bit, we’ve put together this guide on using the device.

More activities!

With all our activity resources, we show how digital making fits into the scouting movement and into many typical activities you’d do with your troop. For example, you can program the micro:bit to be the musical accompaniment to your next campfire. Or, you can create your own custom map to show points on a recent hike that you did together — anything from where someone fell over, to where you saw the most amazing view.

More support!

Next year, we’re going to release even more material to support Scouts tackling the Digital Maker badge. We’ll carry on producing videos like this lovely one:

We’re also going to be trialling some leader training days to build your digital making confidence. In the meantime, if you have any questions, you can always email scouts@精品日本一区二区三区在线观看.org.

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The lucky Pioneers

The summer camp was organised specifically for the winners of the two Pioneers challenges Make us laugh and Make it outdoors. Invitations went out to every team that won an award, including the Theme winners, winners in categories such as Best Explanation or Inspiring Journey, and those teams that received a Judges’ Recognition. We also allowed their mentors to attend, because they earned it too.

Excited about @1909影视基地_Pi Pioneers day at @Google today with @jm_paterson and The Frontier Team #makeyourideas https://t.co/wZqfqqgZuL

— Code Club Scotland (@codeclubscot) July 28, 2017

With teams of excited Pioneers arriving from all over the UK, the day was bound to be a great success and a fun 最大胆裸体人体牲交免费 for all.

The Pioneers Summer Camp

The event took place at the rather impressive Google HQ in King’s Cross, London. Given that YouTube Space London is attached to this building, everyone, including the mentors and the 1909影视基地 Pi team, was immediately eager to explore.

image c/o IBT

In rooms designed around David-Bowie-associated themes, e.g. Major Tom and Aladdin Sane, our intrepid Pioneers spent the morning building robots and using the Google AIY Projects kit to control their builds. Every attendee got to keep their robot and AIY kits, to be able to continue their tech experiments at home. They also each received their own 1909影视基地 Pi, as well as some Google goodies and a one-of-a-kind 1909影视基地 Pi hoody…much to the jealousy of many of our Twitter followers.

Meanwhile, mentors were invited to play with their own AIY kits, and the team from pi-top took accompanying parents aside to introduce them to the world of Scratch. This in itself was wonderful to witness: nervous parents started the day anxiously prodding at their pi-top screens, and they ended it with a new understanding of why code and digital making makes their kids tick.

After the making funtimes, the Pioneers got to learn about career opportunities within the field of digital making from some of the best in the industry. Representatives from Google, YouTube, and the Shell Scholarship Fund offered insights into their day-to-day work and some of their teams’ cool projects.

And to top off the day, our Pioneers winners went on a tour of the YouTube studios, a space to which only YouTube Creators have access. Lucky bunch!

The evening

When the evening rolled around, Pioneers got to work setting up their winning projects. From singing potatoes to sun-powered instruments and builds for plant maintenance, the array of ideas and creations showcased the incredible imagination these young makers have displayed throughout the first two seasons of Pioneers.

As well as a time for showing off winning makes, the evening was also an opportunity for Pioneers, mentors, and parents to mingle, chat, swap Twitter usernames, and get to know others as interested in making and changing the world as they are.

The Pioneers Summer Camp came to a close with a great Q&A by some eager Pioneers, followed by praise from xxxvideoeshd CEO Philip Colligan, Mike Warriner of Google UK, and Make it outdoors judge Georgina Asmah from the Shell Centenary Scholarship Fund.

Become a Pioneer

We’ll be announcing the next Pioneers challenge on Monday 18 September, and we’re so excited to see what our makers do with the next theme. We’ve put a lot of brain power into coming up with the ultimate challenge, and it’s taking everything we have not to let it slip!

Well, maybe I can just…don’t tell anyone, but here’s a sneek peak at part of the logo. Shhhh…

One thing we can tell you: this season of Pioneers will include makers from the Republic of Ireland, thanks in part to the incredible support from our team at CoderDojo. Woohoo!

We’ll announce the challenge via the 1909影视基地 Pi blog, but make sure to sign up for the Pioneers newsletter to get all the latest information directly to your inbox.

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To everyone’s surprise, the sun has actually managed to show its face this summer in Britain! So we’re not feeling too guilty for having asked the newest crop of Pioneers to Make it outdoors. In fact, the 11- to 16-year-olds that took part in our second digital making challenge not only made things that celebrate the outdoors – some of them actually carted their entire coding setup into the garden. Epic!

The winners

We set the challenge to Make it outdoors, and our theme winners HH Squared really delivered! You best captured the spirit of what our challenge was asking with your fabulous, fun-looking project which used the outdoors to make it a success. HH Squared, we loved Pi Spy so much that we may have to make our own for Pi Towers! Congratulations on winning this award.

Watching all the entry videos, our judges had the tricky task of picking the top of the pops from among the projects. In additon to ‘theme winner’, we had a number of other categories to help make their job a little bit easier:

• We appreciate what you’re trying to do: We know that when tackling a digital making project, time and tech sometimes aren’t in your favour. But we still want to see what you’ve got up to, and this award category recognises that even though you haven’t fully realised your ambition yet, you’ve made a great start. *And*, when you do finish, we think it’s going to be awesome. Congratulations to the UTC Bullfrogs for winning this award – we can’t wait to see the final project!

• Inspiring journey: This category recognises that getting from where you’ve started to where you want to go isn’t always smooth sailing. Maybe teams had tech problems, maybe they had logistical problems, but the winners of this award did a great job of sharing the trials and tribulations they encountered along the way! Coding Doughnuts, your project was a little outside the box IN a box. We loved it.

• Technically brilliant: This award is in recognition of some serious digital making chops. Robot Apocalypse Committee, you owned this award. Get in!

• Best explanation: Digital making is an endeavour that involves making a thing, and then sharing that thing. The winners of this category did a great job of showing us exactly what they made, and how they made it. They also get bonus points for making a highly watchable, entertaining video. Uniteam, we got it. We totally got it! What a great explanation of such a wonderful project – and it made us laugh too. Well done!

The Judges’ Special Recognition Awards

Because we found it so hard to just pick five winners, the following teams will receive our Judges’ Special Recognition Award:

• PiChasers with their project Auqa (yes, the spelling is intentional!)

• Sunscreen Superstars, making sure we’re all protected in the glorious British sunshine

• Off The Shelf and their ingenious Underwater Canal Scanner

• Glassbox, who made us all want Nerf guns thanks to their project Tin Can Alley

• Turtle Tamers, ensuring the well-being of LEGO turtles around the world with their project Umbrella Empire

Winners from both our Make us laugh and Make it outdoors challenges will be joining us at Google HQ for a Pioneers summer camp full of making funtimes! They’ll also receive some amazing prizes to help them continue in their digital making adventures.

Massive thanks go to our judges for helping to pick the winners!

And for your next Pioneers challenge…

Ha, as if we’re going to tell you just yet – we’re still recovering from this challenge! We’ll be back in September to announce the theme of the next cycle – so make sure to sign up for our newsletter to be reminded closer to the time.

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Failure can be good!

But, as with many a cliché, there is an underlying truth that it is worth revisiting. Designing, engineering, and creating all involve making mistakes along the way. Even though failures feel bad, by reaching out when something goes wrong, you can call on the expertise of your community, learn, and make the final result better.

However, we often think failing also makes us look bad, so we don’t talk about it as an essential part of the process that got us to the end stage. We make things shiny and glossy to big-up our success, putting all the focus on the result. This tendency is, however, not necessarily helpful if we want to help educate others. As Jonathan Sanderson of NUSTEM puts it:

#stem educators: worth noting: confessions of rank stupidity in digital making get responses, sympathy, offers of help on Twitter. (1/2)

— Jonathan Sanderson (@jjsanderson) March 24, 2017

…yet our write-ups only feature the things we did right. Mis-steps and recovery from failure are key parts of process. (2/2)

— Jonathan Sanderson (@jjsanderson) March 24, 2017

The NUSTEM team truly believes in this: when sharing their builds, they include a section on what they would do differently next time. By highlighting the journey, and the mistakes made along the way, they are not only helping those that also want to go on that journey, they are also demystifying the process a bit.

Celebrate your fails

Because failure feels bad, we don’t routinely celebrate it. But there are niches where failure is celebrated: Simone Giertz’s (slightly sweary) YouTube videos are a great example. And then there is Hebocon, the Japanese competition for cruddy robots. In fact, the organisers of Hebocon make a great point: crafts that do not go as intended are interesting.

This is as much true when working with young people as it is in the wider world. In Pioneers, we also want to do our bit to celebrate failure. Our judges don’t just watch the teams’ videos to see how they overcame what went wrong along the way, they also have an award category that celebrates wrong turns and dead ends: ‘We appreciate what you’re trying to do’. Our first challenge‘s winning entry in this category was PiCymru’s We Shall Overcomb:

The category name was suggested by our lovely judge from the first cycle, stand-up comedian Bec Hill: it’s one of the accepted heckles the audience can shout out at her stand-up scratch nights. Scratch nights are preview events at which a comedian tests new material, and they are allowed to fail on stage. We may not often think of comedy as embracing failure, but comedians do scratch nights specifically to learn from their mistakes, and to make the final product all the better for it. Interestingly, scratch nights are hugely popular with audiences.

So, if you’re working with a group of young people, what can you do to encourage learning from failure and not let them give up?

Helping you to fail better

In our book Ideas start here, for Pioneers mentors, we’ve given a few tips and phrases that can come in useful. For example, if someone says, “It isn’t working!”, you could respond with “Why not? Have you read the error log?” RTFM is a real thing, and an important skill for digital life.

We agree with engineer Prof Danielle George, who believes in being honest about your failures and highlighting their importance to where you’ve got now. “I fail a lot,” she says. “The trick is to embrace these failures; we don’t have to succeed the first time. We learn from our mistakes and move forwards.”

If, as a mentor, you’re not sure how to encourage and support those not used to failing, this article also has some more tips.

If nothing else helps, but you need to feel inspired, think about what someone said to Karen, who sucks at surfing:

Karen, you are actually pretty good at surfing. Keep in mind that billions of other humans wouldn’t dare even try.

How about you? If you have a story of what you learned from failure in one of your projects, share it in the comments!

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The creativity on display comes from allowing teenagers to approach a problem from whatever angle they choose. Pioneers has been designed so that it’s flexible and people can take part however they like. As well as making sure the challenge we set is as open as possible, we’re also pretty chilled about how teams participate: when and where the making gets done.

We are as chilled as a polar bear in a bucket hat

We’re delighted to see that lots of teenagers have been getting together with their mates, hanging out, and working out how they can best freak out their mum.

https://youtu.be/jmHBOxOTkRo

Some of the groups told us that they met at a regular time, and while there was a lot of chat, they’d also find some time to make some cool stuff. Others had some intense sessions over a couple of weekends (certain team members may or may not have been involved with extra bits of tinkering between sessions).

Getting involved in Pioneers

If you’ve got some teenagers lying about the house, why not see if they’d like to challenge themselves to make something linked to the outdoors? We’ve got some starter projects to give them a bit of inspiration, but they can respond to the challenge however they like, as long as they are using tech.

Our challenge for this round of Pioneers: get outdoors!

If you’re mentoring one of these informal Pioneers squads, you are probably mostly there to remind that they might want to meet up, and to prompt them to make their video in time for the deadline. You don’t need to be a tech expert in order to be a mentor, but if you’d like a confidence-booster, you could watch some of our videos to level up your skills. And if you do get stuck on something technical, you can ask for help on the 1909影视基地 Pi forums.

For more information about working as a squad, or about mentoring one, check out our Pioneers page. We can’t wait to see what you come up with!

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