By combining our free instructional YouTube playlist with the Kerbal Space Program video game, you’ll easily be able to introduce your child to complex engineering concepts that are normally only covered in upper-level college classes. Better yet, your child will have plenty of fun along the way.
This post is not sponsored, and we do not have any business relationship with the developers of Kerbal Space Program.
Why Aerospace Engineering Is Worth Studying
As we’ve previously described, aerospace engineering is one of the key topics for budding young engineers to encounter. The number of skilled workers needed to maintain the world’s aviation infrastructure is truly vast; the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there are more than 60,000 aerospace engineers in the United States alone. These professionals enjoy a wide variety of fulfilling career paths, including designing new aircraft, testing drones, developing new materials that can survive harsh environments in space, and writing software to control flight trajectories. They also make some serious money: the median salary for an aerospace engineer is $126,880 (yes, you read that correctly).
Regardless of whether your child decides to go to college and major in aerospace engineering, this course will prove greatly beneficial. The challenges of aerospace engineering overlap with those of many other technical fields, so the skills students pick up in this course will be useful for many other purposes. Most importantly, students will hone their ability to tackle complex problems in thoughtful and creative ways, which will aid them for the rest of their lives.
Using this Curriculum
Our free playlist begins with a tutorial video that will guide students through some of the information they will need to become proficient with building and launching spacecraft in Kerbal Space Program. After watching the video, students should play the game and replicate what they saw before returning to the playlist.
Throughout the playlist, students will occasionally encounter additional tutorial videos. On each of these occasions, they should again start up the game and replicate everything from the tutorial.
In addition, the game should be made available for your child to play and experiment with, preferably for extended blocks of time (multiple hours). The deep thought required for engineering requires the ability to sit and concentrate for extended periods of time, so it’s much better to allow students to spend an entire day focused on one or two subjects, rather than to try and squeeze in a few minutes of coursework for every subject. Let your child spend as much time as they want with the game, within reason.
To complete this course, students should:
- Watch the entire playlist.
- Successfully land a crew member on a moon and bring him or her home safely in Kerbal Space Program.
Don’t be surprised if your child needs to spend 50 hours playing Kerbal Space Program before being able to complete requirement 2.
One important note: Kerbal Space Program has received many updates over the years, which have added or changed slight details about the game. The tutorial videos were created for a relatively finished version of the game, but your child may notice some small inconsistencies compared to the current version of the game. If anything doesn’t make sense, a quick internet search will probably help you find the answer. Kerbal Space Program has an active fan community that is more than happy to help new players figure things out.
The Playlist
Our YouTube playlist consists of more than 20 hours of material, and is available here. It consists of two types of videos:
- Tutorial videos that guide students through some of the early steps of playing Kerbal Space Program. These videos will show your child how to do everything necessary for this course, so that playing the game is a smooth an experience as possible.
- Videos providing in-depth discussions about the science behind aerospace engineering, the history of spaceflight, modern technologies, and much more. In addition to providing a clear window into the world of aerospace engineering, these videos will also help your child evaluate the merits of aerospace engineering as a potential career path.
Kerbal Space Program
In Kerbal Space Program, players manage an upstart space agency on the planet Kerbin, which is populated by a species of plucky little green aliens called Kerbals. Players design rockets and other vehicles, pilot them through flight maneuver planning, perform experiments in space, and (hopefully) bring their crews safely home.
All of this is handled through a fairly accurate simulation of the actual physics of spaceflight. While the game does simplify certain details, successful players will need to account for key concepts associated with orbital mechanics, Newtonian physics, aerobreaking, thermal control, aviation, and much more. The simulation is good enough that it’s impossible to master Kerbal Space Program without learning a massive amount of real-world rocket science.
Along the way, players will research increasingly sophisticated spaceflight technologies. This delivers an important sense of progression, while also easing players into the full depth of the game. By the time players research all the available technologies, they’ll be sending spaceships on complex interplanetary missions that span an entire solar system.
Kerbal Space Program is truly a magnificent video game that has already played a major role in the education of a new generation of professional rocket scientists. In fact, the development team associated with Kerbal Space Program has created a video that covers the impact the game has had on the aerospace industry. Although the video was created as advertising material, it is an accurate depiction of the overall impact of Kerbal Space Program, and I’d recommend giving it a view.
Teaching Through Failure
Kerbal Space Program is very difficult, but also very forgiving. Any mistakes be undone simply by loading a previous save, and the game even provides a special button to do this more easily for failed flights. It’s okay for kids to struggle with the game. Kerbal Space Program will always let them dust themselves off and try again.
The interactive, trial-and-error nature of this experience will give your child more than any textbook could ever hope to offer. Formal, paint-by-numbers approaches to educational are notoriously bad for knowledge retention. How much of your own education have you forgotten, after all? The things we remember are always the experiences that leave us with some emotional consequence: a feeling of accomplishment, or joy, or perhaps frustration. On that point, I promise: your child will never forget executing their first orbital rendezvous high above the atmosphere of Kerbin.
Setting Up Kerbal Space Program
Kerbal Space Program is available on Steam, so we recommend that you follow our detailed “Parent’s Guide to Buying Educational Games on Steam”. It normally sells at a price of $39.99, but you can likely get it for less than $10 if you wait for a good sale.
When you launch Kerbal Space Program from Steam, you may be asked to create an account with Private Division. If so, you can just click the “Skip” button.
When Kerbal Space Program first launches, it is possible it will appear in a window that only fills part of the screen, like the one in the picture below:
It is much better to play the game in fullscreen mode, where the game takes up the entire screen. To switch to fullscreen, first click “Settings” in the Kerbal Space Program menu.
Now, click the “Graphics” button on the left of the screen. Set the “Screen Resolution” to the resolution of your computer screen, and make sure the “Full Screen” option is selected. Click “Apply” to test out the new settings. This should switch to full screen mode, and if you selected the correct “Screen Resolution”, everything should look correct. If you didn’t select the right screen resolution, the screen might look distorted, or some parts of the window might not be visible. When everything looks okay, click the “Accept” button.
If you don’t know the resolution of your computer screen, this is usually quite easy to figure out. In Windows 11 you can right click on a clear space on your desktop background (that is, the background you see when you don’t have any windows up) and then click “Display Settings”. This will bring up a window that lists your “Display resolution”, which is the value you need.
Should I get Kerbal Space Program or Kerbal Space Program 2?
A sequel to Kerbal Space Program, which is unsurprisingly titled Kerbal Space Program 2, was recently released in “Early Access”. This term describes games that aren’t really finished, but are available for people to purchase and download in an incomplete state. When it is finished, Kerbal Space Program 2 is intended to significantly expand upon its predecessor; however, many key features are not currently available. While we are hopeful that Kerbal Space Program 2 will eventually be in a state where we can endorse it, at this moment, we recommend that students stick with the original Kerbal Space Program.
If and when Kerbal Space Program 2 is sufficiently complete to provide an educational experience that is superior to the first game, we will update this post accordingly.
What Next?
There’s plenty more a motivated child can do with Kerbal Space Program. You might want to check some of Scott Manley’s tutorials, which cover interplanetary missions and other advanced concepts. Otherwise, just let your child spend some more time exploring the many possibilities within Kerbal Space Program.
There are also a couple of expansions to Kerbal Space Program that you may want to consider:
- The Breaking Ground Expansion, which adds new parts that students can use for all manner of new creations, as well as new things to explore throughout the solar system.
- The Making History Expansion, which adds a series of missions that ask players to replicate real-world historical space missions, as well as some new parts and other features.
Neither of these expansions is crucial for the purpose of this course, but the Making History Expansion does have the nice educational benefit of helping connect Kerbal Space Program to real-world rocketry. If your child just wants to play around more with the exploring the solar system, Breaking Ground is probably something they would get more enjoyment from.
