High-Level Project Summary
Although not generally regarded by the population, solar storms cause many of humanity’s issues. Their potential impact is quantified by the NOAA scale, which, given it’s importance, is worryingly unknown by the population. Our idea is a clicker game based on the sun. In NOAH™, you progress by tapping the screen, gathering more resources as you advance. While you upgrade and develop your technologies, the user will also learn the facets of the main satellites and be challenged to use the NOAA scale to understand it’s patterns, allowing them to exploit more efficient ways to earn in-game money. This way, learning about the scale will not only be easier, but you’ll also have fun doing it!
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
What exactly does it do?
The project is a clicker game, aimed at teaching people about information collected by solar probes, mainly parker, which are translated to a more popular understanding.
By earning research points, the user unlocks new probes to explore the sun, and learn about Sun and exploration data.
How does it work?
The more you click, the more money you earn. With that money, you buy gradually better technologies. In these moments the user will learn the characteristics of these main satellites and, with them, follow and identify each of the 5 phases of the NOAA scale,
going from G1, where the sun is "quiet" and little on earth is affected, to G5, where the sun is in its extreme phase and intense blackouts can happen. Our team thought about every detail with great care. During the G5 phase, there are black screens, simulating blackouts. The stains in the design of the G5 are the sunspots, which are more frequent on this scale. Pills of knowledge that the user will not even notice.
What benefits does it have?
It is an intuitive game that casually shows space science history. This way, you can have more attention from a different public to teach and foster knowledge.
What do you hope to achieve?
We hope to achieve an easy and intuitive game that could captivate the users to play, read and learn.
What tools, coding languages, hardware, or software did you use to develop your project?
Our team used the Game Maker tool, programming with game maker language, combined with Android Studio.
We painted the 2D assets (Sprites) in Game Maker.
Space Agency Data
NOAA SPACE WEATHER SCALES
Hackathon Journey
Space Apps experience was a tiring and fun, frustrating and rewarding.
We learned to communicate with other teams, to work in pressure and to be efficient when dividing and making tasks. We also learned to trust our team members and that everyone work is primordial.
We decided to make an interactive app because we thought it was the best approach to create an involving environment to learn and have fun.
We had a lot of setbacks and challenges, but we decided to always be talking and trying to be in the same page, because having 4 different point of views was helpful to get the bigger picture of the problems. But when it persisted, we decided taking breaks to refresh.
We would love to thanks ours professors that believed in us all of the time, were supportive and helpful all the time.
References
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/noaa-scales-explanation