APPollo

Tampa | On the Way to the Sun

Awards & Nominations

APPollo has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Finalists Honorable Mentions

APPollo: A Brilliant SunDay

High-Level Project Summary

We created a comic book telling a story about a girl, Hannah, inspired by Parker’s spirit to face and solve challenges. The book uses conversations between the main character and Parker to show how the design of the probe overcomes the challenges of space. Illustrations in the book give the reader visuals of what different concepts look like. The language of the book and the add-on games are tailored to K-12 students as we use metaphors to simplify complex scientific concepts into relatable and understandable text. We hope our book will increase students' interest in space missions and broaden their view on science subjects.

Link to Final Project

https://1drv.ms/u/s!Al_Ft8oie5k9byn1MzC119SU4w4?e=duadOI

Link to Project "Demo"

https://1drv.ms/p/s!Al_Ft8oie5k9de5RCeFb1E95lho?e=f0l4Nw

Detailed Project Description

The main goal of A Brilliant SunDay was to create an engaging way to express Parker Solar Probe's challenges and ingenious solutions on its flight to the Sun's corona.

Though the concepts of Parker’s flight may be complex, we aimed to illustrate metaphors used in NASA videos, so the reader can understand the ways Parker overcomes the harsh conditions of space. The book has several other features, such as an audio file attached with the book that increases accessibility for people who might have visual disabilities, a game that demonstrates how effective Parker's heat shield is, and an exit quiz that allows users to review what they’ve learned and retained from the book’s information.

We used Clip Studio Paint to produce the illustrations and Canva to add different comic book elements to the drawing. We also used Visual Studio Code to write the JavaScript code for the exit quiz and we used OpenProcessing to host it. For the Heat Shield game, we used Scratch to produce and run the scripts. We used StoryJumper to create an eBook with audio features. We used a template designed by Slidesgo to prepare our demo.

Space Agency Data

The major resources that we used to develop this project are the articles and videos of the Parker Solar Probe created by NASA at https://blogs.nasa.gov/, the articles and videos at the website of https://sppgway.jhuapl.edu/, and the images and news presented at NASA’s #SolarTour on Twitter and Facebook.

Because of the nature of the comic book, we did not use statistical data in our project.

Hackathon Journey

Over the Hackathon, our team learned to manage our time more wisely and work more efficiently. We had many meetings together to decide the workload and brainstormed together on what content should be in the project. We also learned about how to effectively collaborate and communicate with each other through virtual meetings when we could not meet in person. Though each of us had a lot of work, we managed to get it done within a short timeframe. This was our illustrator's first time doing digital art, but she learned how to produce digital art with a tight schedule. When we needed help, we asked our other teammates for assistance and we learned to work together as a group. Working together lets us create something that none of us could have done alone.

Lastly, we’d like to thank our parents for driving us to have in-person meetings and buying pizzas for us.