By Khalida Sarwari
About a dozen students from a science camp at Del Mar High School gathered at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View on Aug. 15 to brainstorm products and services for space. Among those ideas were asteroid mining, a space hotel and a space junk collector.
The goal of the workshop was to teach the students about the role that engineering, computers and science play in developing tools for future space travel, said Connie Skipitares, a spokeswoman for the Silicon Valley Education Foundation, a nonprofit resource and advocate for students and educators as well as corporate and individual donors.
The students were ninth-graders in the “Stepping Up to Science” summer program at Del Mar taught by Brian Ellis, a physics teacher at Prospect High School, and Anne Hefflinger, a math teacher at Del Mar. The SVEF-sponsored program is a free 2 1/2-week intensive course to help academically struggling incoming freshman boost their science skills before they enter high school.
For Ellis, this was his second year teaching the class and the first time he was involved in such a workshop. The course was a math and science “boot camp,” he said, with a lot of hands-on activities, one of which had the students build circuits.
“We were trying to find a way to tie the math and science together,” said Ellis.
The workshop was the culmination of the class. During the three-hour workshop, the students broke up into teams to brainstorm a product useful for life or travel in space. They were assisted by volunteers who are retired engineers. After the brainstorming session, the kids toured the museum to finalize their ideas.
“We focused on space exploration ideas that would make money, because we spent time in class discussing Mars,” said Ellis.
The workshop ended with the teams pitching their ideas to a panel of “venture capitalists,” which included Ellis and Hefflinger, whose task was deciding which idea they would fund based on how good and practical it was.
The winning idea was a company that would send robotic vehicles into space to retrieve “space junk” from inactive satellites and other space debris and then bring that junk back to Earth to sell to recyclers.
It was “the most polished, most well-thought out idea,” said Ellis.
Though far-fetched now, some day these ideas just might become reality.
Junk collection, mining, hotel? Students have ideas for space
