A few months ago, the French National Centre for Space Studies (CNES) launched a nationwide call for projects.

Thomas Pesquet, French ESA astronaut, decided to take an artistic, media, technological or scientific project with him on his next mission aboard the ISS (International Space Station) in 2020.

"Génération ISS" is an extraordinary challenge aimed at students — and the beginning of a story for Digital Campus Toulouse.

After forming a team within our school made up of:

The "Save The World" project was born.

 

We created a connected module made up of a screen, a camera, and a likes counter.
Its purpose is to use artistic works to denounce all the environmental issues we have been facing for several years: climate change, pollution, and more.
Digital Campus Toulouse is part of the Galileo Global Education group, which brings together 37 different schools across 10 countries worldwide. We wanted to create a project with an international dimension. The ISS orbits our planet 16 times a day. We therefore divided the Earth into 6 zones corresponding to different continents. In each zone, a Facebook page is created and managed by students from schools within the group. The goal is simple: to pit the continents against each other in a social media "likes" competition in order to generate visibility and make the event go viral. Each time the ISS flies over a zone, the corresponding Facebook page is unlocked via a VPN and locks again as soon as the ISS moves to the next zone.
At the end of the week, the likes are tallied using the counter and the winning zone gains access to the screen on the module. That is when the artworks come into play. Throughout the entire duration of the mission — 6 months — artistic creations in the form of graphic design, illustrations, videos, photos, and more will be produced and displayed on the screen, which is itself filmed live by the camera aboard the ISS. The purpose of these works is to send a message to the whole world and raise awareness of environmental issues.
We had to contend with all the technical constraints of this challenge. To reach the ISS, astronauts travel aboard the Soyuz spacecraft, which leaves very little room for a project like ours. We therefore adapted our prototype to make it modular, so it takes up as little space as possible. We also chose to build it using recyclable and renewable materials such as bamboo, in order to stay true to the message we want to convey.
It was an incredibly enriching experience and we never expected to get this far in the adventure. We are very proud of ourselves and of representing the values of our school, which constantly drives us towards innovation and pushing our own limits. We stuck together from start to finish and we take nothing but positives away from this challenge!