The European Astro Pi Challenge
The European Astro Pi Challenge is a project by the ESA Education Office, in collaboration with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, offering primary and secondary school students the amazing opportunity to run scientific investigations on the International Space Station (ISS) by means of computer coding.
The first Astro Pi competition took place in the United Kingdom as one of the educational initiatives part of British ESA astronaut Tim Peake’s mission Principia. At that time, the UK Space Agency partnered with Raspberry Pi Foundation and, with ESA’s support, two augmented Raspberry Pi computers equipped with a Sense HAT (Astro Pis), were uploaded to the International Space Station (ISS) to be used for the competition. The two Astro Pis, nicknamed Ed and Izzy, are still in orbit, available for new student challenges!
Taking on the heritage of the Astro Pi UK competition, ESA decided to open competition to the rest of Europe and organised the first European Astro Pi Challenge for the school year 2016-2017. Participating student teams had to design a science investigation which required the exclusive use of the Astro Pi and its sensors, and write the code needed to execute it. Codes had to be written in Python computer language. Teams selected to participate in the Challenge received an ESA Astro Pi kit to be able to perform their experiments and test their codes.
To support the participating teams, ESA’s Education Office also developed a set of teaching and learning resources in collaboration with the ESA ESERO national offices: classroom activities, videos, and webinars, as well as training for teachers. Find more here.
The European Astro Pi Challenge has now become an annual tradition. ESA is happy to announce the Astro Pi Challenge 2017-2018, with different mission assignments and more opportunities for student teams to have their code run in space!
