In 2006, the foundation of Art & Culture Drenthe (Stichting Kunst & Cultuur Drenthe) asked us if we could maybe come up with a project that could travel from school to school, be somewhat educational but also quite entertaining. This is what we came up with.

What if we imagine that there's a small family business, run from the rural province of Drenthe, that does general space maintenance? We'd call it "De Ruimtewacht", which is a pun on the dutch "De Wegenwacht", which is the de-facto road service company in The Netherlands.

This Spacewatch has invented a hugely weird but very efficient motor for general space-travel, with the only slight downside of it being that it takes five small people to operate. This is where the children come in.

The children were invited to visit a website and apply for a small testdrive with this spaceship, to see if they could get a job. They would be told what kind of repair they would be making in space, and what captain would accompany them.

Once inside the spaceship though (which would arrive tucked away neatly inside a Ruimtewacht company van) they would get a weirdly stressed captain who looked like nothing in the picture, that would take them on a journey with an obviously altogether different agenda.

We built the spaceship, with 5 consoles for the crew to operate it via weird knobs and levers. During the travels they interact with the journey in a number of ways - being silent to prevent them from sinking through a swamp-planet, for example, or controling a virtual robot-arm to repair an ancient space telescope. An online report is generated from their journey, including pictures of space they take themselves, which they can later spruce up and present to the class or teacher.

The project has now been running for 5 years now, and the reactions from the schools, kids and teachers have been excellent. It's also been on a few theater festivals - minus the online report bit - where it got quite a good response.

Below we posted some pictures of the build and the spaceship. The official Ruimtewacht website is also a good place for some extra impressions and information on the motor, the Ruimtewacht company, and the captains on duty. There's a bit of information on the project on the K&CD site as well.