NSW teens control NASA robots on the International Space Station

Students from five New South Wales schools controlled NASA robots on the International Space Station as part of the global Zero Robotics international coding competition. In the early hours of this morning, teams from five New South Wales high schools - Gosford High School, James Ruse Agricultural High School, Mosman High School, Sydney Boys High School and Sydney Technical High School - watched as computer code they had written was used to control NASA robots inside the International Space Station (ISS). The students gathered with parents, teachers and space enthusiasts to watch the 2017/18 championships of the Zero Robotics international high school programming competition, organised by NASA and top tech university Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The competition was live-streamed across the globe, including at an on-campus University of Sydney event. The Zero Robotics competition challenged students to test their coding skills on basketball-sized NASA robots known as SPHERES (Synchronized, Position Hold, Engage, Reorient Experimental Satellites) which float in zero gravity on the ISS. The competition progressed through multiple rounds of increasing complexity during 2017 before culminating in the final championship event this week, which saw the code that was written by the students being used to move the robots inside the space station, racing against robots controlled by students around the globe, to complete a set of tasks. The NSW schools beat out more than 200 schools from around the world to make it to the finals event.