The main part of their activity was to work in small House groups to design a fictional theme park that would be the first of its kind on the moon. Each group was given a budget, which would need to be paid back from the theme park’s profits, and had to use this to buy rides, cafes, shops, an administration office, ticket offices and toilets. Some groups researched the cost of other items such as ticket booths and drying machines to be used after water rides. The next challenge was to calculate the cost of maintaining and running their theme park, based on the number and size of the items they had bought. They then had to decide upon a ticket price and calculate their annual income based on projected customer numbers over a three week period. The final part of the challenge was to design a business plan presentation to convince NASA to loan them the amount of money required to build and run their theme park, explaining how long it would take them to pay back the loan and why NASA should invest in their theme park over all of the other proposals. The work that each group produced was outstanding; we were particularly impressed by their creativity, the time they spent on the activity outside of the lesson and the clarity of their calculations. The winning teams for each year group were as follows:
Form I
‘BAMS Burger’ by Sophia, Boots, Mercedes and Amber (Austen)
Form II
‘de Luna’ by Victoria, Lydia, Grace and Arielle (De Valois)
Form III
‘Big Bang’ by Kitty, Chrissie and Cece (Somerville)
‘Comet Chaos’ by Amber, Ella and Emmy (De Valois)