Team Space Enabled hosted over 150 Middle School Students and their Mentors for an Educational Program based on Zero Robotics

On July 15, over 150 Middle School students from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York and New Jersey came to the MIT Media Lab for an educational program as part of the summer 2025 Zero Robotics educational outreach event. Since 2006, teams at MIT have hosted Zero Robotics as a platform to teach students about programming robots on the International Space Station while encouraging team work and collaboration.  Professor Danielle Wood is the current MIT lead for Zero Robotics in collaboration with Katie Magrane of the Innovation Learning Center. The MIT Zero Robotics team include Alissa Chavalithumrong (student lead), Dr. Scott Dorrington,  Dinuri Rupasinghe and undergraduate interns Ella Chen and Warren Glover. We had extra help from other team members from the Space Enabled Research Group, including Seth Cornelius and Dana Goodridge.

During Field Day, guests participate in fun, hands on events such as building towers with spaghetti noodles and marshmallows, launching water rockets and learning to program the Media Lab's Jibo Robot from the Personal Robots group. Students also honed their strategies for the 2025 Middle School Zero Robotics coding competiton, which has a theme of teaching robots to help with space gardening. At the end of the day, the Middle School students reflected on the future they want to see, including a healthy planet and accessible technology.