The sounds of sneakers squeaking and children shrieking emanated throughout the fitness center gymnasium at Buckley Space Force Base Tuesday morning.

The gymnasium played host to the U.S. Space Force Mission to Mars event, a simulated interactive mission for about 300 local fifth graders designed to teach them more about Earth’s red neighbor.

Students participated in activities at various different stations with dozens of volunteer Space Force personnel dressed in uniform who led exercises that simulated the necessary components of a mission to Mars, including building inflatable habitats, constructing life support mechanisms and ensuring that all supplies needed for the mission met a strict weight limit.

“The kids were so excited for this,” said Legend Page, a fifth grade teacher at Arrowhead Elementary School. “When I first told them we were going to do science, they were kind of like ‘oh, whatever.’ And then I explained the whole field trip and suddenly they were looking up space facts on their own.”

Among the activities students engaged with, the main focus was constructing an inflatable, igloo-like structure made out of plastic tarps and held together with duct tape. Additionally, students also built life support devices out of cereal boxes and plastic bottles, and helped put together a map of Mars using puzzle pieces.

“It’s lots of fun,” said one student from Page’s class, adding that a favorite Mars fun fact is that the planet has clouds made of ice.

The teachers from the four schools — Edna & John W. Mosely P-8 and Aurora Quest K-8 from Aurora, as well as Arrowhead Elementary and Antelope Ridge Elementary School from the Cherry Creek School District — began preparing for the event as early as August, said Stephanie Iverson, the school liaison for Buckley Space Force Base and the coordinator of the event.

The program was based on one started by the Air Force Research Laboratory in New Mexico that integrated with the statewide fifth grade curriculum, which is similar enough to Colorado’s standards that adapting the program for local schools was not too difficult, Iverson added.

The event works well in the context of Buckley’s other STEM-based academic outreach programs that bring students of all ages on the base to learn more about its work, she said.

“A lot of folks in the Denver community don’t even know there’s a base on the east side of Denver called Buckley, or what goes on there,” said Col. David Knight, the vice commander of Space Base Delta 2 at Buckley. “Opportunities like this allow us to connect better with people in this area. We want to pull the curtain back on what the Space Force is and what we do for this community.”

Tuesday was the first year that Arrowhead had attended the event and capped off a school year of students learning about space and the solar system as part of their social studies class, Page said.

“This was an enriched activity we got to add in to make it more fun for them,” Page said. “It’s amazing. I hope we get to come back again next year.”