Mars New Year Festival gets youth ‘fired up’
MARS — Mars New Year Festival announced 2023’s Mars STEAM Challenge winners for science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics Saturday, June 10.
“I think that, overall, the projects were all fantastic,” organizer Jessica Beasley said.
The Mars STEAM Challenge tasked nearly 70 students from across the country to help future colonists “survive” or “thrive” on the red planet, according to Beasley.
“So we expanded it this time to include the arts as well,” she said.
Students in grades three through 12 submitted 48 projects to the “survive” and “thrive” categories. “Survive” included science, technology, engineering and math, and “thrive” focused on the arts for this virtual competition.
The projects were judged by a panel of six NASA professionals, and there were 24 winners, Beasley said.
Mars Area High School junior Carson Mahan took third place in grades nine through 12. He said, “This year they introduced the ‘thrive’ category, which was basically arts, and so that incorporated arts and also kept the original science theme of it. That just made it a bit more accessible.”
Carson’s project, Home Away from Home, was a globe sculpture of Earth and Mars separated by a border of starry space. “I thought it would be cool to have a sculpture, because a lot of people do paintings — and that’s just two-dimensional,” he said. “So having something three-dimensional kind of helped show the wonders of space.”
Carson’s sister Sage, an eight-grader, said the addition of the art category helped “inspire more ideas.”
“So I wrote a piano piece about the journey we took from Earth to Mars, and then when a dust storm comes on Mars and how we recover from that,” Sage said. “And in the video, I painted watercolors for the all the different scenes.”
Sage’s project, Red Planet Explorers, took first place in grades six through eight.
“I take piano lessons, and I thought it’d be really cool to make a piece that represents my feelings of how it would be when I — if I — went to Mars,” she said.
Sage and Carson competed in the event during previous festivals, but this was the first time for their brother, Spencer, a fourth-grader.
Spencer said his project, Parachute Drop, won third place in grades three through five.
“It’s very fun, and I like that the challenge takes more than just a few days,” Spencer said. “And I also like the money that you win, and that I can go to a NASA scientist.”
For third place, Carson and Spencer each won $100 in scholarships. Sage won $500 for first place.
Mars high school senior Daisy Snow took third place for her “survive” project.
“My STEAM project was on terraforming, so that is transforming Mars to have Earth-like features to support life like this,” Daisy said. “And I did have how we would get a cow to Mars and how would a cow live.”
Daisy, a member of Mars Space Pioneers 4-H STEAM club, also recently had been crowned Butler County Dairy Princess for her commitment to dairy promotion. For the Mars New Year Festival, she even created a hashtag to promote the industry: #MilkIsOutOfThisWorld.
“It’s such an honor; I am so excited to go around all of Butler County and promote dairy,” Daisy said. “I just want people to know the behind-the-scenes of the dairy industry and the truth about how their products are being processed.”
Daisy said it also was an important part of better understanding how to get milk to Mars for colonists.
“I think that our generations that are coming in are getting more interested in science. They want to know especially about this because of where we live,” Daisy said. “This is Mars, and people don’t realize that’s a really cool name, and we should learn about the planet and bring science into the schools.”
Mars Robotics Association’s mentor and president Jeff Beckstead agreed.
“Mars has something unique,” he said. “The community is really catching on to that unique name and making something of it.”
This year, the associations’ Robotic Village offered guests a chance to take control of miniature Mars Perseverance rovers — part of NASA’s 2020 mission to the planet to determine habitability and searching for signs of past life.
Association member Sofia Furman, a ninth-grader at Mars high school, said the exhibit helps guests understand NASA’s mission as well as the importance of the robotics association.
“This is the Aldrin map, which is a giant topographical map of Mars; it shows all the different elevations,” Sofia said.
The map was littered with 3D-printed replicas of test tubes Perseverance has been collecting and distributing on the planet, Sofia said. Guests were challenged to navigate the map with the association’s robots to recover a test tube.
“We’re using them to collect these samples that we laid out to bring back to Earth, and it’s just like the future mission is going to do,” Sofia said. “As Perseverance is dropping the test tubes, in the future mission they will be tested for life — so is/was life possible on Mars?”
While the test tubes at the festival were filled with candy and prizes rather than alien life, Sofia said the exhibit regularly inspires students to join the association and learn more.
“Last time, I believe we had a small handful of kids that ended up joining afterward,” she said. “And then also from our other events, we’ve had kids join as well in the past.”
Organizer John Donehoo, Mars New Year board member, said the call to action is what he hoped guests took away from the festival.
“That they get fired up about the future, that they get fired up about what’s happening right here in Butler County, in their own backyard,” Donehoo said. “And I think for families and young people that they know about, hopefully, the emerging opportunities — why this is a great place to live, the education but then also the career opportunities that are right here.”
Donehoo said the festival was an important step in helping young people shape the future together.
“You can either have the future handed to you — so to speak kind of decided for you — or you can say, ‘I want to help build it,’” he said. “And I think this is kind of that idea — we want to help build it.”
