“Man must rise above Earth to the top of the atmosphere and beyond, for only then will he fully understand the world in which he lives” – Socrates.

Online activities introduce students to the history of domestic and world astronautics. With the help of STEM, children build, explore, and program space objects and plan flights to the stars.

In early March, I registered for a great course from the European school academy Aerospace in Class. During the course, I learned a lot of new, useful, and important information. Applying the course material, I developed a lesson plan and implemented it with the students at my school. The lessons involved students from Grade 5 to Grade 10.

Since we are currently studying online, my activities were organized via Zoom, taking into account the time limits for students of different ages. The cycle of activities lasted from April 8 to April 18, so as to include April 12 – the International Day of Human Space Flight.

During the first stage of the lesson, the students were familiarized with the history of flights, literary works by famous writers and the development of astronautics; later, they went on a virtual tour of the National Museum of Cosmonautics.

Then the students worked with the resources from https://www.airbus.com/. The use of the Airbus Foundation Discovery Space piqued the students’ interest and stimulated creativity and motivation. The children watched videos, discussed them, and put forward various hypotheses about space travel.

The next step was to study the jet motion and determine the speed of a spacecraft relative to the Earth. After working on the physics material, the students compiled a Python program to visualize the results. At the same stage, younger students were working on Learning about Space, where they learned about space and how to survive it by playing exciting games. Following that, they made a Scratch project for a flight to the Moon.

My students also enjoyed the construction of a paper rocket and its launch. Another group of students also showed their creativity by creating models of rockets in Tinkercad.

Finally, the use of resources from https://www.geogebra.org/ allowed us to study, explore, and understand complex space processes with the help of mathematics. Dynamic models made it possible for the students and the teacher to illustrate, visualize and demonstrate various astronomical concepts.

I believe that thanks to these activities, space will become a lot closer to my students in the future.