Strap the little darlings to a rocket, light blue touch paper and retire? A bit harsh – perhaps a video game would be better. A group of scientists are developing software that will put kids in the driving seat of a Moon rover, or in charge of repairing the International Space Station (some marathon games on the cards there, I reckon) …

I learned about this at the evening’s poster session – for the uninitiated, that’s where hundreds of scientists pin their latest research to boards lined up in a large hall, and then spend a couple of hours cruising around to see what the competition are up to.

Emerson Speyerer, an undergraduate at Northwestern University involved in the project, explains to me that the game will be aimed at 12-18 year olds. If the team can get a corporate sponsor, they hope to give the game away free as part of a teaching resource pack that will help enthuse the youngsters about science. It’s early days, though – they don’t even have a website yet, and the poster is very much a pitch to raise interest from the planetary scientists here.

The team plan to build the game using the graphics engine from a first-person shooter such as Doom or Quake, but incorporate real images and data from NASA missions. As yet, it’s unclear whether the kids would get to use the BFG9000 to hunt the Clangers, but I think it’d be a nice touch.