Message to the future

Message to the future - school competition 

The competition closed on 29 November 2019.

Beginning with Pacific peoples, many cultures have voyaged to Aotearoa at different times from all around the world. They navigated across the seas using stars as their guide. The voyagers travelled in state of the art craft using the stars in outer space and the environment to guide them. They were scientists, innovators, astronomers and astrologers.

The New Zealand Space Agency created a competition to run alongside the Ministry of Education’s Tuia Mātauranga 2019(external link) education programme which is available to schools across NZ, and supports Tuia–Encounters 250(external link).

One of the learning topics in the Tuia 250 commemorations programme and the Tuia Mātauranga framework is that of Voyaging. Centuries ago, travelling to Aotearoa required a huge amount of innovation, ambition, foresight and knowledge of celestial navigation.

Today, New Zealanders are still looking to the stars and we are creating new opportunities to discover and travel into space.

This competition was designed to get classes thinking ahead to the next 100 years of voyaging and our shared future in space.

Winning schools

Young space enthusiasts in a new entrant class at Hope School in the Tasman District have won an online meet and greet with a NASA astronaut after dreaming up a creative entry to the New Zealand Space Agency’s ‘Message to the Future’ competition. The message answered the question ‘what could be our future in space?’.

Here is the winning poem from Room 3 at Hope School:

‘A Trip to Space’

We could zoom to the Moon
Or float out to Mars, The Red Planet,
With dusty storms
Dark red like a light that is not working properly.
We could land on hot Venus
Hot like lava.
We could swoop out to Jupiter
With its swirling red spot storm
Spinning like a bey blade
Or take a rocket to the hot shiny Sun
Throwing out rays of light under Maui’s net
We would go past sprinkled stars
Glowing in the black darkness
Of Space.

The winning pupils will now have the opportunity to ask all of their burning questions about space with a former astronaut and they will each receive custom ‘Message to the Future’ mission patches for their efforts.

Second place was awarded to Class 19 at Havelock North Intermediate in Hawkes’ Bay for their entry, and each student also receives a custom ‘Message to the Future’ mission patch. Ka pai!