What Farpoint Offers Utah's Students: Experiential Education at its Best. A Saturday Story with Programming Classes, Space Clubs, Development, and Private Missions. Do We Ever Sleep? Theater Imaginarium.

Coding Starts our Saturdays at Farpoint

It's ALL Go every Saturday at the Farpoint Space Education Center located on Utah's beautiful Silicon Slopes in Lehi.  

From 8:00 A.M. to 9:30 A.M. most Saturday mornings Farpoint offers the 2017-2018 Level 1 Programming Guild: Coding for Young Astronauts and Voyagers.  This is where the magic of starship and experiential simulations begins. Saturday our first crop of youngling programmers hit the keyboards to learn the basics.  We use GoogleCS as our curriculum. 

We're learning to code with SCRATCH.  This eight-week course will be the first of three offered to our cadets this school year.  From this Level 1 class, our cadets will have the option of advancing to the Level 2 program - the WebDev Guild sponsored by Alex and Crystal Anderson, Matt Ricks, and Isaac Ostler.  The WebDev Guild meets every other Saturday from 9:30 - 11:00 A.M. 

Want a peek at the cadets in action?  Take a look....

The Young Astronauts and Voyagers Arrive on the Heal of the Young Coders?

The 2017-2018 Young Astronaut 3rd Grade Phoenix Squadron (Wednesday's), One of Farpoint's 26 Cadet Squadrons
 Ready for Any Challenge Space Has to Offer!

Saturdays from 9:30 - 11:30 A.M.  The Young Astronauts and Voyager Clubs Meet.  

Farpoint has 260 cadets in 3rd through 10th grade divided into 26 squadrons in this year's Young Astronauts and Voyager Clubs.  The 26 squadrons meet every late afternoon, Monday through Friday and Saturday mornings.  What a great bunch of young cadets. It will be a fun year.

11:30 A.M. to 2:00 P.M.  Thorium Testing.

The Magic of Experiential Simulation.  Farpoint Reserves Time on Saturdays for Imagineers to Test New Ideas and Software. That Next Cool Thing you Experience on a Starship Has to Start Somewhere.

Saturday's Thorium Bridge Software Test Crew

Farpoint prides itself in offering the Voyager as a testing facility for new ideas in experiential learning. Saturday was witness to the first official mission using the new Thorium bridge software. I asked Alex Anderson to write a summary of the event.

In programming, we say “Make it work. Make it right. Make it fast.” Thorium has officially passed the first hurdle. It works. This past Saturday we successfully ran an entire test flight from start to finish! There were a couple of hiccups here and hiccoughs there, but overall it worked well. 
Huge thanks for Isaac Ostler, Matt Ricks, Crystal Anderson, and the whole Voyager staff for their help and support as Thorium goes through it’s growing pains. In the past few months, the controls have taken leaps and bounds in progress.
If you are interested in using the controls in your Space Center, have your center’s director get in touch with me. If you want to run the controls personally or at home, you can get the code from https://thoriumsim.com. You can also donate, which gives you access to a bundle of images and videos, a built version of Thorium, and credit on the Thorium website. 

Alex Anderson

Saturday is a Day for Private Missions at Farpoint

There isn't a Saturday that goes by without a private late afternoon/evening Starship Voyager mission at Farpoint. This Saturday the Voyager played host to a 4.5 hour mission booked through our partners at the Telos Discovery Space Center. 

How Do You Get Involved? 

I'm glad you're asking that question.  Contact me.  Director@SpaceCampUtah.org for more information.  SpaceCampUtah.org is another good place to start. It has links to the clubs and information on booking a private mission.  

Mr. Williamson

Theater Imaginarium

The Best Gifs of the Week Edited for a Gentler Audience