The R2T2 Mars Mission is an educational project developed at EPFL for grade-school and high-school classes that use the Thymio robot. A total of 180 teams have signed on to the project, which is teaching the students a variety of new skills.
It is the year 2032. A meteorite has damaged a power station on Mars. Thankfully, there are 16 Thymio robots on site, ready to restart the main generator. To accomplish the mission, which runs until 11 June, 180 teams of students between the ages of 8 and 18, from all over the world, will attempt to program the robots located on the surface of the red planet – or at EPFL, to be exact.
“This year, we’re running 12 missions spread over three weeks. Each one involves between 10 and 16 teams and lasts for three hours,” say engineers Evgeniia Bonnet and Karen Jones, who are leading the project – dubbed Remote Rescue Thymio II (or R2T2 for short, in a nod to Star Wars) – at EPFL’s LEARN Center for Learning Sciences.
Source: “Mars Mission” attracts more than 700 students from around the world”, EPFL News
