LA HERMANDAD

Montevideo | On the Way to the Sun

Race to the sun!

High-Level Project Summary

We designed a board game inspired on the Parker solar probe. The board game is aimed at people of all ages and is played by 2 to 5 players approximately.It is based on the journey the solar probe had and the diferent challenges it faced during its voyage. We managed to create an interactive product through which both children and adults can learn about the different problems that had to be overcome during the mission in an interactive and entertaining way; telling the events chronologically with characters, cards and interactive designs.

Link to Final Project

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FKoZSdPAjzm3RXynqK_eohxCLfdRQoxFd_fDjWDRO24/edit?usp=sharing

Link to Project "Demo"

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EMx6Y3eEIAPdnM1FCeCrH53st-yaKqpk/view?usp=sharing

Detailed Project Description

Our project (box game) aims to enable people of all ages, specifically young audiences, to learn about the mission of the Parker Solar Probe. Players start by choosing a character (token) from which they can choose NASA workers, the Parker Solar Probe, or the ship from which the Parker Solar Probe was launched.


The objective of the game is to reach the sun (final destination of the probe) before the other players. But that won't be easy: to start moving in the game, you must roll a die and move the squares corresponding to the number indicated on the die, but... be careful! because you can fall on a red square that harms you.

But it can also happen that you land on a green square, which helps you advance faster to your goal.


When landing on one of the green or red boxes, the player must take a card of the corresponding color from the deck of cards, and will have to fulfill the challenge indicated on it.

These challenges will be imaginary situations in which events that occurred or could have occurred during the mission will occur, such as ´´You have discovered a zone free of cosmic dust´´ or ´´ The measuring instruments of the probe have not been deployed´ ´.


In addition to the red and green boxes, there are also white boxes in which you do not have to complete any challenge, but in each of them an event that has occurred during the Parker Solar Probe mission is written in chronological order.


We believe that unlike other projects such as making an explanatory video or a blog, this is a way through which children and young people can learn in a more interactive way about the subject, getting involved in the decisions and events that occurred in the mission, thus also making them feel part of NASA!


There were different objects that we had to design for the project. For which we mostly use paint.net and our imagination!


First we start designing the board by drawing it by hand as well as the cover and back cover (with instructions) of the board game box.

Then we use Paint.net to make the designs.

In the case of the board design, we decided to make a simple design, with a drawing of the planet Earth at the beginning of the game and another of the Sun at the end of the game, and in the middle a space design with stars to which we added the different boxes , a drawing of Venus given its importance in the mission and two sectors to place the red and green cards.


To make the back cover we used a design similar to the one we had made on the board but only from the outer space with stars, since we did not want it to have many drawings because the instructions would be written there.

Next, the board game box lid took the most time to design. We also use Paint.net. For this, we took an image of the ship that launched the probe from the internet and we based it on it to make a takeoff design.


Finally, to design the back of the tokens and cards, we used paint.net and Word to design the part where the challenges on each card are explained.


We also used OpenShot to edit the video we did to eplain how to play the game and and CapCut to add a written explanation to the video.

Space Agency Data

We used data from these sources:




Hackathon Journey


Through the experience of the hackathon, we learned several things, not only interesting facts about a topic such as the Parker Solar Probe (which we did not know about before the challenge started), but we also learned to work as a team in a orderly, since we only had 48 hours to devise and carry out as much of the project as we could.

We learned to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each team member in order to use our skills to our advantage, and we learned to use tools like Open Shot to edit our presentation video.


Researching the different challenges, our team was captivated by this specific challenge, as we felt that we could put our creativity and artistic skills and ideas into practice, as well as we loved that it was aimed at young audiences, since from our point of view was more challenging as we had to ´´put ourselves in the shoes´´ (think like) a child.

The latter was obviously more challenging, since the most difficult thing was not only to create a creative solution, but also to explain scientific events in a simple way that the children could understand.


We begin to devise our challenge on Saturday morning, looking for information on the subject based on the links provided by Space Apps / NASA.


After realizing that through our challenge we could tell the story of the Parker Solar Probe mission in chronological order, we decided to make a box game through which as the player progresses they can learn about space events. /scientists occurred in the mission.


One of the biggest challenges for us was not only coming up with short sentences to describe complex scientific events in an easy to understand way, but also the design of the game's characters. None of the team had a lot of artistic skills to do a detailed character/token drawing, but we were able to work it out. We decided to start by designing the board, cards, and game cover/back cover on the first day, in order to have time to design the characters on the second day with more time.


Another challenge we had was to make the box game original, at first we only thought of tokens that had to reach the goal (the sun), but then it occurred to us to add cards with challenges. We believe that these help not only to make the game more interactive and entertaining, but through them we were able to add more information so that children / young people learn about the subject.


We would like to thank all the team leaders and organizers of Space Apps Challenge Uruguay for helping us at all times with the doubts we had about how to carry out and deliver the project.

References

NASA data sources:



Tags

#boardgame #parker #probe #sun #NASA #Uruguay #LaHermandad #Family #Kids

On the Way to the Sun

On April 28, 2021, during its eighth flyby of the Sun, Parker Solar Probe did what no other human-made object has ever done: it “touched” the Sun—meaning the spacecraft flew through the Sun’s upper atmosphere (the corona) and sampled particles and magnetic fields there. Your challenge is to develop a creative way to tell young audiences the inspiring story of Parker’s record-breaking journey from Earth to the Sun and all the perils it overcame on the way.