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Marshall Space Flight Center’s Great Moonbuggy Race is this weekend, April 12-13.

I helped out a high-school team this year, part of the local (New Orleans) Explorer Scout post. And I learned something which is potentially applicable to Mars Society chapters looking for outreach opportunities.

Until a few years ago, the activities of the local Explorer post consisted mainly of lectures on engineering and science (and possibly other things, but I’m talking about what sorts of things the people I know did with the scouts). The kids weren’t all that energetic about it, and it was difficult to get them involved in the lectures — not surprising when they had just spent seven hours being lectured to in school. One of my coworkers hit on the idea of demonstrating some of the principles being discussed, with hands-on experiments and such, and the scouts took notice. With more activity came more interest and more involvement in the post.

The following year, he discovered the Great Moonbuggy Race. It was a challenging task, but the scouts were interested and motivated, and they managed to put together two moonbuggies and enter the competition. Since then, more scouts have become involved, and they are up to three moonbuggies this year. Every Saturday for the past few months found several dozen scouts and parents working in the shops at the University of New Orleans, piecing together three remarkably sophisticated vehicles, while learning the basics of engineering and gaining shop skills that I as an engineer wish I had had at that age.

The point of this is: here is something that the Mars Society should be doing. Whether it is working with local schools to enter teams in this particular activity or one similar to it, or opening up chapter projects to involve high-school and college students, or even developing a new sort of competition along these lines within the Mars Society itself, giving people something to do will get them more involved and more enthusiastic than simply organizing a local chapter bureaucracy or delivering a canned lecture to a captive audience.