While Raspberry Pis might be going up in a rocket to the International Space Station for Astro Pi, you don’t need to hitch a ride on a Soyuz to get your own Pi into the stratosphere. That’s what the recent Skycademy course was all about: a Picademy designed to show teachers and educators how to get started with high-altitude balloons (HABs).

“I’d been thinking about the possibility for a while,” says Dave Akerman, who’s well known in the Raspberry Pi community for making Pi-powered HABs, even holding the record for the highest altitude an amateur has streamed images from. “I approached Lance Howarth at Raspberry Pi back in January. It was really when James Robinson joined the Foundation that things started to move, with the planning starting in April.”

James Robinson is a member of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s education team, and apparently the Skycademy concept was one of the first event ideas mentioned to him when he joined:

“Having done a launch myself, I’d seen that there’s not a huge amount involved in each launch, and, although it’s not overly technical, there’s lots of different disciplines. My role in organising Skycademy was to try and bring some educators together to organise all the logistics behind it and sort of hold their hands throughout their first launch to show them that it is possible, to bring them together to work as a team, and really to give them that support during their first launch. Then hopefully they’re going to go away and teach others while doing further launches.”

So after juggling the places and managing a waiting list, on 24 August four teams of six teachers met from around the UK to start planning a launch over the next two days.

“The teams were loosely geographical,” James tells us. “Our Southern team was Exeter to Kent, so it was very loose. We gave them all an overview of high-altitude ballooning; we talked about the different disciplines and things that were involved. We talked about the maths and gave them an overview of the flight and flight profile and how it works. Then we went through a series of workshops showing them how to set up their payload, build a container around it, and how to track and receive any telemetry coming from those payloads. We tried to give them as much preparation on that first day as possible.”

As the teachers went off for the night, James and Dave’s work wasn’t done, as Dave reveals:

“James and I then continued late into the evening, getting a receiving station set up at Pi Towers, then grabbed a few hours’ sleep before the launch day.”

“Speaking of sleep, we’d both lost plenty of that already, worrying about the wind conditions and landing predictions, both of which were rather poor. At one point I was emailing James at 4am to tell him that we would probably have to cancel the flights!”

In the end, conditions improved and with a change in launch site, all that was left was the launches.

“I was really blown away by how quickly they took on board what we’d shown them, as were the two experts that we had. As soon as Dave had demonstrated his launch, the teams just disappeared and were off setting up and launching their own balloons.”

After four successful launches, the teams tracked their balloons and went to retrieve them when they fell back down to Earth following a lofty flight to 35km above sea-level. The final day saw the teams evaluating what they had done and figuring out how they could perform their own launches for students. Skycademy wasn’t just those three days, though, and the attendees will be reporting back over the next several months about launches they’ve been doing.

“The event was just the beginning of a project,” James explains. “This marks the start of a year-long project beyond these two-and-a-half days: we’re funding each of those teachers to do a launch themselves with their students. Because that’s really important to us that, actually: it’s not just a bit of fun for a few days, there’s lots of learning and great opportunities in this activity to show that science, technology, engineering, and maths are all really interrelated disciplines. They all come together in this kind of thing so we can launch a space mission, or pseudo-space mission, for no money really. We’re going to support each of the attendees financially and with support logistics over the next year to do their own launches.”

If you regret not getting yourself signed up to Skycademy, don’t worry: this is not the one and only time the course will be run. If the results of this course go well, James and Dave hope they can continue it as an annual event.

Check back over the next year, in which we’ll hopefully be able to show off some of the successful launches from attendees of the Skycademy.