Touching the Sky: Giving Every Student a Voice Beyond Borders
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Figure 2. Project LCD displaying “Italy, Scotland, Afghanistan”, connecting the electronics activity with the international collaboration. Photograph: Corrado Campisi. Licence: CC BY 4.0.
On 26 May 2026, a stratospheric balloon launched from Mossi Airport in Novi Ligure carried the Da Vinci Caelum probe to a maximum GPS altitude of 30,193 metres. Alongside its instruments, it carried digital copies of students’ drawings, letters and messages. The launch marked the end of months of preparation and the beginning of a new phase: recovering the payload, analysing the data and sharing the experience.
Figure 1. The multimedia laboratory at IIS “Ciampini-Boccardo”, transformed into the operational hub of Generation STEM for online seminars, live broadcasts, podcasts and international meetings. Photograph: Corrado Campisi. Licence: CC BY 4.0.
As an electronics teacher, I wanted students to contribute to a real mission through tasks that would put their abilities to the test. We aimed to use digital tools for collaboration, help students take responsibility within a team, and interpret real measurements. Developed within Generation STEM, “Touching the Sky” also had a shared purpose: to bring young people from different countries together and let their work “touch the sky”. Their drawings and words could travel together, even when their authors were far apart.
The idea began one summer night in Sicily, while I was looking at the sky. I wondered how to turn that curiosity into a school activity that could also engage students who felt distant from science. Contact with Education Cannot Wait subsequently opened the way to Learn Afghan. Alongside our collaboration with Wallace High School in Stirling, Scotland, this connection helped shape a project involving Italian and Scottish students and Afghan girls.
Different skills and meaningful roles
Between November 2025 and May 2026, students from several programmes at our school participated, including automation, mechatronics, health and environmental studies. Their different skills helped shape the organisation of the work.
Some students managed online broadcasts and filming, while others configured the audio equipment. A group worked on podcasts, and others prepared questions for experts and helped communicate the project. Technical and scientific activities developed alongside writing and multimedia production.
This division of responsibilities offered several ways into the project. Preparing an interview required understanding a topic and framing clear questions. Managing audio meant checking that participants could hear one another. Organising contributions required careful handling of files and matching them to their contributors. Each task had an identifiable purpose within the shared work.
A laboratory connecting schools
One practical difficulty concerned space: our school had no assembly hall where all participants could gather. We therefore brought the multimedia laboratory back into use and turned it into a control room for seminars and online meetings.
Using OBS Studio, Google Meet and recordings archived on YouTube, we could reach classrooms and partners remotely. Students helped with technical production and hosting, taking responsibility for tasks essential to the events.
Sessions with the Astronomical Observatory of the Aosta Valley, the Italian Space Agency, Planetek Italia and Thales Alenia Space supported the preparation. Astronomy, Earth observation and space robotics offered different perspectives on the mission and on careers in research and technology.
The laboratory also became a place for podcasts and accounts of the experience. Communication was also part of the scientific work: documenting an activity meant deciding what to explain and how to make it understandable to others.
Part of this work is documented on the Generation STEM YouTube channel, which brings together recordings of meetings and project content. The archive allows readers to revisit activities and offers other teachers concrete examples of the work undertaken: https://www.youtube.com/@GenerationSTEM.
An archive of contributions ready for flight
Participation extended to lower secondary schools in Novi Ligure and the Oriani-Guarino school in Naples. Students created comics, drawings, letters to Earth and reflections on their futures. Girls from Learn Afghan contributed artwork and texts to the same mission archive.
We managed the materials through a bilingual form, a spreadsheet and cloud storage. An automated process using Apps Script assigned mission identifiers and generated boarding passes. Digital copies of the contributions were prepared for transfer to the microSD card carried on the flight.
This process connected creative work to a specific technical task. A drawing produced far from Novi Ligure could be received, organised and included in the payload. Shared tools helped us address the practical challenges of geographical distance.
The girls from Learn Afghan contributed their own artwork and texts to the shared archive. Together with contributions from Italy and Scotland, these materials made the mission an opportunity to create something across borders. The title Touching the Sky expressed this intention: students could see their work become part of the same journey, alongside that of peers in other countries.
Launch and learning from the data
Involve Space provided technical and operational support for the launch and telemetry. Be-Pilot supported hosting and logistics at Novi Ligure Airport. Working with professionals placed the school project within a real operational setting, with complementary responsibilities and expertise.
After the flight and recovery, students analysed the data. Mission documentation records a maximum GPS altitude of approximately 30.2 kilometres, alongside measurements of pressure, temperature, humidity and the gas sensor’s response.
Interpreting the results meant connecting the numbers to the probe’s journey. Graphs showed the ascent and descent and allowed comparisons between the recorded variables. The geographical track added another dimension: the balloon had moved west from its launch site.
The data also raised questions for further investigation. GPS altitude and the altitude estimated by the sensor did not match exactly. The gas sensor’s response required caution before drawing environmental conclusions. Such differences provide opportunities to discuss how measurements work, which conditions affect them and what conclusions the evidence supports.
What other schools can adapt
The experience suggests approaches that can also work in smaller projects. Assign different tasks and make each task’s contribution to the shared goal explicit. Establish a simple system for collecting and documenting work from the beginning. Allow time for follow-up: an event produces materials that can become the basis of further learning.
A school can apply these approaches without organising a balloon launch. Students could collect environmental measurements, compare them with those of a partner class and communicate the findings through writing, images or podcasts.
Touching the Sky has left us with a documented collaborative experience and data we can continue to explore. Students in different countries contributed to the same mission through their skills, drawings and words. Their work reached the stratosphere together.
For me, this is the meaning of the project: creating a shared undertaking in which young people can recognise their own contribution and discover the contributions of others.
About the author
Corrado Campisi teaches electronics at IIS “Ciampini-Boccardo” in Novi Ligure, Italy, and coordinates Generation STEM. His work in science education combines electronics, laboratory-based learning and international STEM collaboration, with a particular interest in creating opportunities for students to take part in real scientific and technological experiences.
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