"Countdown" and "Mission Control" will take over the North Seattle Community College basketball court on Monday, Dec. 6, at 9 a.m. A simulated robotic exploration will place four robot landers on a simulated surface of Mars in search of evidence of life on the Red Planet.

The demonstration is a culmination of a fall quarter project, "The Mission to Mars Project," between Computer Science (Engineering) and Astronomy students. The Astronomy students have developed experiments and determined the path the robots would take once they landed on the Martian surface. The Computer Science students have programmed four robots to carry out the science teams' requirements. The teams encountered real physical limitations that required changes to the project, much like an actual exploration of Mars would.

A $10,000 innovation grant from the state titled "Using Robots to Teach Critical Thinking - A Cross-Disciplinary Approach" enabled instructors Tracy Furutani (Astronomy) and Keith Hughes (Computer Science) to create a teaching situation using technology in the classroom. Furutani and Hughes fashioned a real-lief scenario that incorporated the use of robots in teaching and combined their two fields of study. Although there are no students in common between the two classes, four teams - two science and two engineering - met together three times during the quarter to transfer instructions from the science teams and report back challenges from the engineers.

Project development has been on a Web site (http://northstar.sccd.ctc.edu/other/m2m) and has encouraged considerable discussion between the science and engineering teams.

During the live demonstration on Dec. 6, the four teams, sitting in "Mission Control," will receive only a video feed and a radio signal from the robots as they proceed across the terrain. Introduction of Computer Programming (CSC 110) and Life and the Universe (AST 210) will be taught again winter quarter, which begins Jan. 4.

For more information, call 528-4501 or 527-3663. North Seattle Community College is located at 9600 College Way in the Licton Springs neighborhood.