ANN WASON MOORE

WHEN it comes to shooting for the stars, we just got schooled. With Pimpama-based Gilmour Space Technologies signing a deal with NASA to build an experimental Mars rover, the lesson is simple: the sky is not even the limit for the Coast’s brightest minds.

But how do we teach that to tomorrow’s space cowboys?

In an educational age where we focus on OPs, QCST, NAPLAN and STEM, we’re so caught up in the alphabet rankings that we’re losing sight of the bigger picture.

It’s not just the technical skills that schools and parents must teach children, but the ability and ambition to dream big – and to handle failures when they fall short of shooting the moon.

With the release of Queensland’s highest achieving OP schools, the headmaster of the Gold Coast’s top-achieving school Somerset College says their consistent results come down to great staff and extra academic support.

But I believe there’s another secret ingredient.

While training kids in the latest science, technology, engineering and mathematics (that’s STEM for us old folks) methods is great, the fact is that not every student is going to excel in this area. More importantly, not every student is going to be interested in these applications.

Sure, jobs of the future are likely to be based in this industry – certainly the money already is. But if you don’t really like it, who cares? Not only will you not score highly, you could – far worse – end up with a job you hate.

The secret to success for schools is to allow students to imagine their passion … and to follow that dream. If that’s hospitality rather than calculus, so be it.

If I had followed the recommended path of maths and physics back in high school … I’d probably still be there. You’d find me locked in the fetal position in the corner of the classroom, self-harming with a slide ruler.

But instead, my parents and teachers encouraged me to do what I both loved and did well. So I didn’t select a single science and managed to pass only the affectionatelytermed “veggie maths” – but nailed English, drama, economics and history … and aced the OPs.

Still, the wait between subject selection and final results must not have been easy for my father, a STEM genius back when the industry was just a seed.

You see, Gilmour Space Technologies is not boldly going where no man has gone before – but where my own dad went back in the 1970s.

The Queensland-born maths prodigy was part of the NASA team which sent the unmanned Mariner 9 space probe to Mars.

It was the first spacecraft to orbit another planet, managing to narrowly beat the Soviets in the Cold War space race, and returned more than 7000 other-worldly images back to planet Earth. My mother has the framed certificate to prove it. (She actually laminated it … clearly she failed Home Ec.)

While I definitely did not inherit Dad’s mathematical prowess, I was following in his own footsteps when I veered off the academic path. He taught me that it pays to dream.

Aside from his space work, he was on the cutting edge of voice recognition technology in the late 1980s. In fact, that was part of the reason we returned home to the Coast.

While our city’s reputation may be built on tourism, the fact is that in many ways we are a frontier town that prides itself on betting on the entrepreneurs, and whose inhabitants are always dreaming of tomorrow’s next big thing.

He believed that this city would believe in him. Unfortunately, he died less than two years after we returned, and with it his dream. But I know he would be so proud to see his city winning a new space race.

Whether your business is rocket science or you’re a student aiming to win the Coast’s next Oscar, the lesson is to follow your heart and give it a go.

As the saying goes … shoot for the stars and you might just land on the moon. Or Mars.

THE SECRET TO SUCCESS IS TO ALLOW STUDENTS TO IMAGINE THEIR PASSION ... AND TO FOLLOW THAT DREAM

Read Ann Wason Moore every Tuesday and Saturday in the Bulletin