DiscoG X Workshop 1: Track the ISS Live with Python

Workshop 1 of DiscoG X, 9 May 2026. Ten workshops marking ten years of DiscoG Coding Academy.

Right now, the International Space Station is orbiting Earth at 27,600 km/hr, completing a full orbit every 90 minutes. In this workshop, students in Years 5 to 9 wrote Python code to connect to a live data feed and track exactly where the ISS is, on a map of the world, updating every 3 seconds. Not a simulation. The actual ISS, live above their heads.

What is DiscoG X?

DiscoG X is a series of 10 Saturday workshops for students in Years 5 to 9, delivered by DiscoG Coding Academy in Harrow. Each session takes on a serious computing topic through a hands-on project built specifically for the series.

Track the ISS live with Python was Workshop 1 / 10. You can see the full series here.

What this workshop was about

The International Space Station has been continuously inhabited for roughly 25 years. It is one of the greatest engineering projects in human history, built by five space agencies across the USA, Europe, Japan, Russia and Canada. It orbits Earth 15 to 16 times per day at an altitude of around 400km, travelling faster than any aircraft ever built.

Students started with a presentation on the ISS, its size, speed and purpose, before learning about the three coordinates their tracker would use: latitude, longitude and altitude. These are the same coordinates used in aviation, navigation and space engineering.

What the students built

Students wrote the Python logic to pull live position data from the ISS and plot it onto a custom flat-world map. Every three seconds, the station's position updated on screen, tracking its sinusoidal orbit across the globe in real time. Working through the code together as a group, step by step, each student typed it into their own machine and ran it live.

Students read live ISS coordinates from their tracker and recorded each position on their world map worksheet.

Each student also received a printed worksheet with a world map. They recorded the ISS latitude, longitude, altitude and time at five different moments during the session and plotted each position by hand. This grounded what was happening on screen in real geography, making the numbers feel meaningful and the scale of the ISS orbit genuinely feel big.

How it went

The energy in the room was something else. Watching the ISS move on screens with programs they had written themselves, connected to a real space station 400 km above Earth, was a genuine moment.

Since the workshop, students have been going back to re-run their tracker during their weekly coding classes, just to see where the ISS is now.

A handful of students' trackers running live. The ISS orbit updating on screen every three seconds.

Why this matters

The skills behind this project connecting to live data feeds, reading real-time coordinates and translating them into visual output, are the same skills used by engineers and developers working in space technology, mapping, aviation and data science today. Students were not just learning to code. They were using code to do something real.

This is what DiscoG Coding Academy has always been about. Not coding as a subject. Coding as a tool for discovery and creativity.

Join us this summer

DiscoG X is a short series of workshops for Years 5 to 9, but DiscoG Coding Academy runs weekly term-time classes during the academic year as well as Summer Holiday Bootcamps for students in Years 1 to 13.

Whatever stage your child is at, there is a place for them here.

Summer Bootcamps are intensive and hands-on, with Specialised Courses built around the same approach you've seen in this post. Spaces fill up quickly.

Book a summer bootcamp place.

Not able to make summer? Register your interest for September term-time classes to be one of the first to hear when spaces open.

Any questions? Get in touch!