(WSB photos)

Two days before today’s Artemis 1 splashdown, the moon mission spent an hour at the center of the universe for dozens of students at Denny International Middle School.

Boys from all grades in the Kingmakers program filled tables in the Denny library on Friday afternoon to work with two guest presenters – Amazon employees visiting as part of Hour of Code, an annual series of events around the world marking Computer Science Education Week. We were invited to observe.

Jacq Bolliges and Pedrito Maynard-Zhang – center and right in our photo above with Denny’s Kingmakers coordinator Keenen Allen – were there on behalf of Amazon’s Future Engineer program. But if the name “Hour of Code” has you guessing they sat down with the students for a coding tutorial – that’s not what happened at all. Instead, they spent the hour leading an interactive presentation about the Artemis program and space-exploration technology, with videos and quiz questions. A competitive aspect to the quiz questions had the students cheering and chanting with as much enthusiasm as they’d exuded while discussing the just-concluded Argentina-Netherlands World Cup match before the class got going.

Allen teaches four Kingmakers classes a day and told us this was the first time this year that students from all four classes gathered in one place. Guest presenters have been especially important because the pandemic precluded field trips. Part of the inspiration offered by the guests was their own backgrounds; while Bolliges wasn’t from an engineering background, Maynard-Zhang told the students about starting out teaching himself BASIC on old computers, and pursuing education all the way up to a Ph.D. at Stanford. He taught for four years before going to work for Microsoft and then Amazon.

Before the space-program presentation, the visitors invited questions. First one: “Why is Amazon laying off people?” Bolliges, who had been a recruiter, blamed that on “the economy” but added, “We hope to be back to hiring soon!” The tech industry overall, they noted, has half a million current openings. Students had similarly no-holds answers once the space presentation began and they were first asked about the challenges astronauts face when going into space: “Death!” was the first answer, followed by “being away from their families.”

Things got more technical from there, with information about topics from rocket propellant to telemetry. Every quiz question resulted in cheers. A highlight was when the students ended up chanting “DEEP SPACE NETWORK!” after learning about that communication system (“There are no cell towers in space,” they were informed).

The time flew by, and since it was the last period of the day – of the week, in fact – there was no chance of holdover. Laptops were closed, the guests were applauded, stickers were offered, and the Hour of Code was over. Toward the start, the students had been given one exhortation: “Have fun and think big!”