How the programme came about
An explorer robot arrives from far away and is stranded on a planet it does not know, so it has to learn how the environments it crosses work before it can act. The class travels with it stage by stage through forests, deserts, oceans and mountains, and in each one has to understand what keeps that environment in balance before designing anything that enters it.
The story gives a concrete reason for the scientific research, because the question is not how to build a machine but how to build a machine that does no damage.
Observe first, build afterwards
Each stage begins with observation and discussion, with the group gathering information about the environment, working out what the living things there need and forming hypotheses about what would happen if one element disappeared.
Only then does the class design and build the tool or device the mission needs, so the technical project grows out of knowledge the group has already discussed rather than from an assembly sheet.
Building and programming a behaviour
The devices are built from programmable bricks and reclaimed materials, then given a behaviour through block coding, and at this point the difference between what the group imagined and what the machine actually does becomes plain.
When a solution damages the environment it was meant to protect the problem is not hidden, because that is exactly where the group returns to the design and discusses which constraint had been overlooked.
What the students do
Students move between observation, research, building, programming and telling the story, so somebody who is not comfortable with code can contribute on the scientific or the making side and the project still belongs to the whole group.
Links across subjects
The programme connects science through the study of ecosystems and biodiversity, technology through building and programming, citizenship through reasoning about the consequences of choices, and language through explaining what the group decided and why.
What is left at the end
What remains are the environments built in class, the devices with their programmes, the preparatory drawings and the hypotheses written along the way, which together document the group's reasoning better than a single final product would.
How it can be adapted
The number of environments crossed, the complexity of the programming and whether programmable bricks are used at all change with age and equipment, while the structure stays the same, because every stage always starts from an environment to understand and ends with a solution to test.
