Talk:Exchange

One Student's Account

This page taken from the old Spacesim.org website is the account of a student who participated in the Lexington Exchange. It should be incorporated into this article. Stefanido 16:49, 9 January 2008 (EST)

One Student's Experience of the Lexington Exchange

Lexington's Mission

While our mission here in Ottawa is operating, there are many similar missions running in the United States. One of the schools with such a mission is Lexington High School, in Lexington South Carolina. For this reason, we call their mission our `sister mission'.

Because our missions are so similar, and they all run at the same time in February, we have established an exchange program between the Ottawa-Carleton Educatoinal Space Simulation and the Lexington High School Space Simulation. A few of our students (four or five) go to Lexington for a week, and similarly, their students come to visit Ottawa. I was one of the lucky Canadians that got to go to South Carolina this year. It was an extraordinarily fun experience!

One of the Canadians was chosen to be an astronaut in the Lexington mission. The rest of us worked on Earth with the Mission Control personnel. I noticed that their mission and ours had differences. Every person was assigned a position in South Carolina. There was a person in charge of communications, another in charge of bio-medical experiments. . . I was informally in charge of gradually giving the astronauts their schedule. In the Ottawa mission, however, nobody is assigned a specific position. Everybody does something, whatever is needed to be done!

LHSSS Mission

In Lexington, though, we did not only simulate. Every Canadian was staying with a "host family". My family was very nice and hospitable, and we did many things together (i.e. ride bikes, go to church, eat out, play games). We also organized activities together: one day, we went to Charleston, about two hours away, and visited the beautiful historical city. It was enormous fun! Most of the South Carolinians loved to go shopping, so we would often go to their tiny shopping malls and look around. The most fun outing, however, was on the last day, when Coach Hamby, the teacher in charge of the LHS Space Simulation, brought all the members out to eat, and then invited us over to his place to have some fun, play some games and relax.

We had a lot of fun in South Carolina, and the weather was nice too. I went swimming for about one second in the lake, because in February, it's still pretty cold, but at least it wasn't frozen like it would have been in Canada! Most of the time, we were wearing T-shirts outside!

All in all, we learned new things, made new friends, and had fun... I'm really glad I participated in this exchange program.