Ressources
Matières: | Sciences, arts |
Âge: | 8-12 ans |
Difficulté: | Moyenne |
Documents pour élèves et enseignants
Code – exercices et solutions
A Mars rover must move itself and send information about Mars to Earth.
But how does he know exactly what to do?
A programmer writes a series of steps that the robot executes in sequence. For example, the Mars rover performs steps such as “deploy solar panels”, “deploy wheels”, “switch on camera” after landing safely on Mars.
The question is: how do you control a rover a hundred million kilometers away, rolling on Mars? As we are not on site, it will be operated remotely from earth. A radio signal sent from Earth to Mars takes between four and twenty minutes, depending on the Earth’s position relative to Mars.
A remote-controlled Mars rover would therefore be piloted with a considerable time lag. An example of a direct problem resulting from this: given the time lag, it would not be possible, for example, to brake quickly enough if the rover encountered an obstacle.
It is therefore necessary to program the Mars rover in advance so that it can operate autonomously and automatically as much as possible.
In this lesson, students program their own Mars rover in the Scratch programming environment. A satellite map of Mars will be laid out on the ground, and their rover will be tasked with a mission to find life on Mars.