In 1998, I volunteered to work with our school district's Advanced Space Camp summer program. That camp used the Mars unit available from Interact, 5937 Darwin Court, Suite 106, Carslbad, CA 92008. (phone: 800-359-0961 web: http://www.teachinteract.com/).
I wrote the following handounts. They are ©1997 by David J. Ritchie. You are welcome to use them as long as you credit me, give my e-mail address and web site address in any distribution of the materials.
The Mars Simulation to which these documents are companions is a copyrighted product of Interact. They have not reviewed or endorsed these documents.
The documents are all in Adobe Acrobat PDF format. Follow this link to get the (free) Acrobat Reader if you do not have it..
Introduction
to Computer Simulations and Perl - Mars Simulation [Part 1]
More About Perl and Computer Simulations - Mars Simulation
[Part 2]
Human Factors Simulation - Mars Simulation [Part 3]
Perils Simulation - Mars Simulation [Part 4]
Landing Site Simulation - Mars Simulation [Part 5]
Trajectory Simulation - Mars Simulation [Part 6]
To view the Perl code for the simulation program go here: mars.txt Clicking on the link will bring up a new window showing the code. Use the File Save command in that new window to save it as "mars.pl" on your computer. Once you install Perl on your computer, you can then run mars.pl to try out the simulator.
There are some further documents on teaching Perl to Middle School students on the site here.
Please let me know if you try using any of these materials and how they worked for you.
See the standards document (in Adobe Acrobat PDF format on Interact's web site) to understand what aspects of the education curriculum the Mars unit conforms, according to Interact. Search under the term "Mars" on the Interact web site to learn more about the Mars unit. (I'd link it but it's pulled out of some product database via some sort of query and doesn't seem to be easily linkable.)
The teacher and I discussed how I could best contribute. I had an interest in teaching the students Perl, having just finished doing that for the Computer Club after school during the regular school year. It was important that whatever I did fit with the curriculum of the Advanced Space Camp. What the teacher and I developed was that I should write a computer simulation of the Mars voyage tied to the development of the Mars voyage topics that came up in the curriculum. In the approach of the Mars camp, the students were grouped into independent mission teams--each with the project of planning and executing a mission to Mars and back. What we decided was that I would be a "consultant" for each of the teams working to support their mission.
I did the simulation in Perl. I did it in an incremental fashion.
Each day, the teacher and I did an hour session with the students on the computers (which at this time were Macs) teaching them a limited amount of Perl. We had a Mac for each student and used the LRC Computer Lab in the Middle School where the Space Camp was being held.
This occurred from 8:30 to 9:30 in the morning. Then, I went to off to work at my regular job while the teacher continued on (for the morning, I think) with other aspects of the space camp, such as exploring the "human factors" issues connected with taking a trip to Mars, building model rockets and so on. Then, I came home and put features into the simulation that the students had discussed that day in class. I extended the simulation, debugged it, and wrote the document which is what is linked here. That became the text for the next day's computer session.
The goals of the session were to teach the students enough Perl that they could understand and modify the simulation parameters (basically Perl assignment statements) to explore the effect of changing the parameters of the simulation and to run the simulation.
There were approximately 10 - 14 students with the ratio being two thirds girls and one third boys. I can't explain why there were more girls than boys in this session--the luck of the draw, I guess. The ages were seventh and eighth grade as I remember.
Based on the reaction from the students (who were very enthusiastic about it) the computer simulation seemed to be successful and a good addition to the Mars Space Camp. What they seemed particularly to like was the way the simulation awarded "bonus points" for discovering things on Mars and getting safely back to Earth with them. These bonus points loosely translated into fame and fortune. In the program, I had unintentionally made it give lots of bonus points (like 100,000). The students seemed to get a real kick out of that!
In another case, I had written the simulation so that for a small fraction (~5%?) of the time, the ship would crash on Mars (I think it tipped over due to a soft landing spot or something). One girl was clearly frustrated with how infrequently it crashed. She asked me if there wasn't something I could do about it. I flipped things around so that it crashed ~95% of the time. She ran the simulation and was totally happy.
That was one of the the things that seemed attractive about Perl in this situation. Because it is interpretative, one can make a change and have it effective immediately--no waiting around for compilation or anything. I wouldn't have thought that to be a big deal but with this age group (why am I surprised?) the immediacy seemed to be a big selling point.
For no particular reason, we've not tried doing this again. Personnel have changed, the summer programs have changed, and life has moved on.
I have decided to put my handouts up on the web in case there are others who would like to try the same thing.