Astronerds saving the world

This poster is an educator’s perspective on nine-year-old students' participation in the environmental project “Climate Detectives”, an initiative that engages students with space science and space engineering themes, including curricular and extra-curricular activities.

Climate Detectives is an ESA school project for students between 8 and 15 years old. Students are challenged to ‘make a difference’ in understanding and protecting Earth’s climate by identifying a climate problem by observing their local environment and be tasked to investigate it. The project aims at developing and reinforcing the students’ STEM skills and at stimulating their creativity, critical thinking and initiative to improve their understanding of climate issues and positively changing behaviors that can have an influence on such issues.

In our school’s participation, we focused on the satellites that the European Space Agency (ESA) is using in order to monitor water pollution. We investigated how this technology was used during the horrific environmental disaster that occurred back in 2017 next to our island, Salamina, when an oil spill was formed after an accident.

During the first phase of our project, we investigated what satellites are and why they are the necessary for Earth sciences. We built our own satellites, using LEGO We Do 2.0 and we wrote code in order to program them to move around our inflated Earth. We also found data (pictures from the Copernicus / Sentinel satellites) in order to investigate how large was the oil split was and which parts of our island and other areas of Attica were affected.

During the second phase of our project we read interviews of people in our island on how they felt about the oil spill and how it affected their lives and we wrote a letter to our island’s mayor to express our thoughts.

Furthermore, we contacted the environmental organization of Salamina (PERIVOS) in order to give us a talk about the environmental impact of the oil spill. Finally, we presented our research to other students of our school.