Written by Bella, Hannah, Tia, and Lottie, Year 12
From OHS, four Year 12 students took part in the brand-new GDST Computer Science Space Technology Course running from October of 2021 through to May of 2022. The course consisted of exciting Python-based programming projects focusing on the Webb MIRI instrument, Earth Observation Data Analysis, Motion Sensor Classification, and Raspberry Pi Remote Sensor Logging & Computer Vision.
Although the main focus was on programming, we had our fair share of events away from the computer. After travelling to the University of Hertfordshire safely on the road, we all successfully crashed a plane in a highly anticipated flight simulator. We suspect our teachers were secretly glad that none of us are planning on becoming pilots!
The course culminated in a trip to GDST Headquarters in London, where pairs of us presented our latest research and programming projects to a panel of industry professionals, including members of NASA, and Dr Jin Kang who had previously spoken to us about his work as Director of the US Naval Academy Small Satellite Program. We were thrilled to receive feedback on our work, and ask the panellists questions about data we had collected from the Earth System Data Explorer that left all of us flummoxed!
Through participating in this course, we were granted opportunities to research wider applications of computer science that we may not have previously considered, and use hardware that we might not explore in a classroom setting. Most of all, we had fun meeting students from other schools, and helping each other when graphs we generated came up blank or we couldn’t quite figure out what was provoking an error in our code.