New Worlds Cities In Space

By Lin, Jayesh, Omar, and Darshan

Task: Obtain knowledge and share work done on Moon base project

A contigent from Iron Reign participated in a space competition at the NewWorlds Conference. The idea was to form a interstellar base to self-maintain and extend humankind's reach into the universe. After winning the previous year's competition with a Mars base, the team did a sort of prequel, committing to a Moon base. Involving writing a 21 page research paper, developing a minecraft-modded map, and work in Google Sketchup, the team presented to a group of Space researchers, genetic scientists, and privately-funded space companies over our work. We recieved 1st place for our work and garnered a lot of interest in STEM and space.

Reflections

The convention allowed us to present both to the aforementioned specialists and children who took a field trip to come to the convention. These children were especially attracted by the minecraft design. We led them through walking in the base and testing out our designs. We were able to garner a lot of interest of their concept of space and STEM was. When the judges came to our area, we mentioned how the topics we learned in SEM and in robotics helped us to finish a lot of the fact-checking for the base. In the end there was a lot of interest and praise for our work, even going as far as to convince a researcher to ask in running a molecular biology summer camp at our school. We're excited to build off our success at the competition and use it to help us in FTC as well.