Powell Middle School’s sixth grade students let their imaginations go sky high in the week before Christmas break when they learned about and then presented on the history of American space exploration and the Artemis 1 launch on Dec. 11.

“Artemis 1 is the first in a series of increasingly complex missions that will enable human exploration to the Moon and Mars,” NASA’s official website said. 

Powell Middle School science teacher Necole Hanks said students learned about Artemis 1 by completing a different project in each class period and creating a presentation based on that project. Students then talked about Artemis 1 and the history of space exploration during presentations at the Nelson Performing Art Center on the Northwest College campus.

“[The goal was] to get the kids excited about engineering and about the idea that we are going to the moon and we’re going to have a colony, possibly on the moon and then we’re going to Mars,” Hanks said. “So the whole idea was just to get them jazzed about, you know, ‘this is science, this is the possibility.’”

Hanks’ students learned a number of things from the project both as it related to science and space travel and as it related to life skills as well.

“I learned a lot more about Artemis because I genuinely really like space and stuff,” sixth grade student Aspen French said. “When I really learned about how many different times they have to change or how long it takes to build stuff,  if there is one wrong mistake, then you may have to change the entire thing.”

Fellow sixth grader Zaphira Paul said the project helped her learn about working as a group to accomplish a task.

“Yeah, that could help later in life, working together as groups in other things, like if you’re building something you need to have a group and know how to communicate and do those things well,” Paul said.