SPACETHON: Academic bootcamp methodology to integrate space team's missions.
- Paper ID
67700
- author
- company
National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH); National Autonomous University of Honduras
- country
Honduras
- year
2022
- abstract
MRZ-SAT is the first honduran first Satellite Mission, an academic space project led by the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) -a major public university in Honduras with more 90,000 students per year- with the collaboration of the University of Costa Rica and the University of San Carlos of Guatemala. UNAH's School of Engineering covers six undergraduate degrees including 9000 students. The high number of students represented a challenge to select and train 14 students as part of the team for the satellite mission. The Honduran project's coordination decided to select and train the student team using Bootcamp methodology. The Bootcamp was named SPACETHON and it was designed to select and train the students with the guidance of professionals and professors in the Engineering and Space Sciences areas. In this work, the process itself and the main aspects evaluated by SPACETHON are analyzed: a) interest and commitment; b) individual resolution capacity; and c) the capacity for team collaboration. Finally, SPACETHON as an intensive learning process for students interested in space projects is proposed. This Project-based learning (PBL) methodology, easily adaptable to other academic spatial projects, is shown as a successfull experience to shape student teams for satellite missions.