What it is
The Mars Yard is SAPIENT’s main activity: a physical Mars-like landscape and a rover that learners drive with code. Missions are written in the browser, using block-based coding, and can be tried in a simulator before they run on the real rover. That step from simulation to the real world is known as sim2real.
Live
The Mars Yard is live. The first learners have run code, and the rover has been out with schools and at the Cape Town Science Centre.
Mission Control
Mission Control is the cloud platform behind the Mars Yard. Learners go to the Mars Yard site, code a virtual rover in blocks or in Python, and send that code to mission control. They get back a video of their code running in the Mars Yard at the Cape Town Science Centre.
A group of University of Cape Town Information Systems honours students built it in 2026. The project was made possible by impact.com, through its Impact Academy, and the students were mentored by Werner Van Rensburg of impact.com.
The Mission Control team:
- Werner Van Rensburg, mentor. Senior Director of Engineering at impact.com.
- Kamogelo Tsele, BCom (Hons) Information Systems at the University of Cape Town.
- Konke Cele, BCom (Hons) Information Systems at the University of Cape Town, and founder of Azania Custom Tech.
- Yamkela Dludla, BCom (Hons) Information Systems at the University of Cape Town.
- Hlalanathi Mashimbye, BCom (Hons) Information Systems at the University of Cape Town.
Follow the build
The Mars Yard is being built in the open. The devlogs below show the simulator and the rover getting more capable: a sim2real square driven in the yard, and a satellite returning co-ordinates.