'Space Day' Award Garners Kudos for Home Schooling, Creationist View
by Jim Brown
May 12, 2004
(AgapePress) - Two Maryland home schoolers were recently honored for winning the "Best Overall" project award at Lockheed Martin's "Space Day" competition.| | 
Grant and Samantha Foster |
Fifth-grader Grant and seventh-grader Samantha Foster from Germantown finished first place in their age group for the "Space Trek" design challenge. In their project, the Fosters put forth a creationist view of the solar system and wrote about their fictional journey in search of the Oort Cloud (the alleged "nursery of comets"). After researching the Answers In Genesis website, they realized the Oort Cloud did not exist because the universe is less than 10,000 years old.AIG president Ken Ham says was not surprised the Fosters beat out hundreds of other entrants. He says it shows that those who are home schooled "can do good science and can do good research."
"I think some people think that because people home school that they're therefore not good researchers or anything like that," Ham observes, "and this shows that there are home schoolers out there who are just as good if not better than those who come from a secular education system. And secondly, this shows that you can be a creationist and also be involved in real good scientific research."
According to Ham, his ministry is having an impact on the nearly one-million people who visit the group's website each month. "The more that we do this, the more people like Grant and Samantha take a stand like this [and] the more I believe we see other people who are influenced by this as well," the AIG leader says.
Ham says his group's ministry and the efforts of people like the Fosters help to get the creationist view in the public eye. "It's sort of like a spider web, if you like, just creeping out there through the whole culture -- getting the information out, letting people know that there's information out there that directly opposes the idea of millions and billions of years and evolutionary ideas," he says.
But there is a more important object, Ham says. "[T]he bottom line is telling people [that] the Bible is true -- you can trust God's Word."
It was John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, who presented the "Space Day" award to the Fosters.
