Students take rovers for test drive on museum's red planet Hands-on: Mars rovers at the Powerhouse Museum. Few people can say they have driven a rover on Mars, but Jasmin Ramage, a year 10 student from Armidale, has come close. From her Presbyterian Ladies College classroom, Jasmin became one of the first high school students to remotely control the Sydney Powerhouse Museum's Mars rover, taking it for a spin across the museum's simulated Martian surface. Students from three other rural schools in South Australia, Tasmania and another in Armidale also joined the experience, controlling the rover via the national broadband network. While the digital test drive will be the closest most of the students ever get to the red planet, educators hope it will be the first of many virtual excursions for rural and remote schools. "There's lots of opportunities [for excursions] but because we are regional it's not possible to travel all the time," Jasmin's science teacher Brendan Burke says. Aside from the fun factor, educators anticipate these types of hands-on experiences will boost student interest in science. The museum's Mars yard reflects the planet's surface and allows high school and university students to conduct sophisticated experiments. The manager of the broadband network's Mars Lab project Carol Oliver said participation in high school science had steadily declined over the past 30 years. While 94 per cent of high school students selected senior science in the early 1980s, just more than half of students in their final school years chose to study the subjects last year, said Dr Oliver, a senior research fellow at the University of NSW centre for astrobiology. "And only 13.8 per cent of girls go on to senior science subjects," she said. Engaging students in science can be difficult because they have preconceived ideas of what concepts such as gravity mean, Mr Burke said, and the best way for teachers to untangle these preconceptions was to demonstrate a concept in action. "The benefit of technology is you can set up experiments to demonstrate key concepts that would have been impossible before," he said. Dr Oliver said today's high school students were "digital natives" who needed their teachers to do more than stand at the front of the classroom and read from a textbook. The broadband network's high capacity fibre cable provided a "smoother," more realistic experience of the Mars yard's undulated surface than ADSL connections, she said. The general manager of education Kate Cornick at NBN Co said the network would be rolled out to all Australian schools and provide a "ubiquitous" learning experience for students everywhere, at home or in the classroom.