Life on Earth… and Beyond? Innovating for the Future at Rocket

Newsflash! The Earth has been placed on high alert as sea levels rise to unlivable conditions across the planet. Scientists are now in a race against time to find a new way for humans to live: underwater, over water or even in space.

When teachers at Rocket Productions wanted to join in the celebrations for British Science Week, the year’s theme felt as if it had been written for Rocket: Innovating for the Future. Rocket’s Learning Engineers turned it into a problem big enough for every child across the pre-preps to investigate. Parents volunteered too, dressing up as scientists and recording video messages asking the children for help. Suddenly the mission was real, urgent and theirs.

Two missions, one big question

First years set out to discover whether life under water was possible, or whether the answer might float on top of it. What would a new Water World look like? Second years embarked on a journey to Mars. How do you navigate through a sandstorm, survive extreme weather or land on such an unfamiliar surface?

Children were hands-on throughout. They explored the properties of different materials, observed change and experimented with the physical forces that shape our world: cause and effect, action and reaction, pushing and pulling, air resistance and water resistance, magnets, and how objects move across different surfaces. Along the way they met the foundations of the scientific method, observing, comparing, predicting and adapting, through ramps, egg drops, zip lines, balloon-powered cars and rockets of their own design.

From the world we know to worlds we imagine

The trick, of course, was that something so abstract had to begin somewhere familiar. Before children could innovate for an imagined future, they needed to make sense of the world around them: living things and what they need to thrive, plants and animals that survive in extreme conditions, and the materials and forces they could feel with their own bodies. Building on that embodied knowledge, the children came up with inventive solutions: survival packs, floating homes, rockets, and even ideas for catching space junk.

The project followed Rocket’s enquiry-based approach: What do I already know? What do I want to know? What have I learnt? Children imagined, designed, experimented, adapted and shared, with adults acting as active listeners in an environment full of materials that intrigue and invite investigation.

For Rocket, this is science at its best. It isn’t a set of facts to memorise. It’s pure curiosity, and the confidence to take risks. Faced with a problem no adult could fully answer, the children did what scientists do: they asked better questions, tested their ideas and kept going.

▶ Watch our short video below