High-Level Project Summary
The game Valentinas - On the way to the sun that tells the story of the trajectory of a probe that "touched" the Sun, the Parker Solar Probe. We solved the challenge by bringing the story to the user in a playful and gamified way. Where he will need to complete the given quests to unlock more information about the story. The importance of the game whose main objective is to bring knowledge and approach to the studies carried out by NASA to young people and, in addition, to arouse interest in this specific topic and consequently for others.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
“Valentinas - On the way to the sun” is an educational game that brings to the user knowledge and curiosities about the projects and missions developed by NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration). The game starts by taking the user to NASA, where he will immerse himself in the space agency, meeting the rooms, the scientists and the scholars who work on the Space Agency's projects and missions. During this tour of the environment, he will get information about the history of Parker Solar Probe during the missions that the game proposes. With each mission he will have access to details about the probe that "touched" the sun.
The game “Valentinas - On the way to the sun” develops different skills such as stimulating reasoning, awakening young people's interest in the topic of technology, increasing young people's contact with science and exercising creative reading and knowledge about topics that are not easily accessible in Brazilian schools.
The objective of the game is to bring knowledge to young people and awaken in them the desire to follow professions directly linked to the scientific area and thus awaken in our audience the desire to contribute to changes in the world and thus make it better.
For game development, GbStudio was used as the main tool, in addition to this, Piskel and Tiled were also used.
Space Agency Data
To help us in the development of the game, the data from NASA publications were used to raise the story with a wealth of detail and reliable information about the creation, path and arrival of Parker Solar on the Sun. As it is a story with a lot of data and technical terms, it was necessary for us to work with this data making the language compatible with the target audience, but being faithful to the data.
Hackathon Journey
During Nasa Space Apps, we had an enriching experience, where we had to deal with adversity, solve complex problems, exercise creativity and innovation with limited time.
During this journey, we learned to add ideas, stay focused on the result, have patience, resilience and not give up on the project even with all the challenges that arose during the process.
The inspiration for choosing this challenge was based on research by the Institute of Psychology (IP) of the University of São Paulo (USP), which shows that the interaction of young Brazilians with electronic games is approximately 85% through video games. In addition, we took into account the social impact that this solution could bring to our ecosystem, in which young people would come into contact with the stimulation of science and innovation.
Aiming at our user's understanding of the subject, we approach the story in language compatible with our target audience, bringing the data to them in a clear and current way.
We were able to resolve setbacks with focus and persistence, with resilience, thinking about different scenarios and possibilities, testing and validating.
We would like to thank the organizers, mentors and volunteers who made the event possible and provided us with an unforgettable experience.
References
To research the history of Parker Solar, these sources were used:
https://g1.globo.com/ciencia/noticia/2021/12/15/sonda-da-nasa-toca-o-sol-pela-primeira-vez.ghtml
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/traveling-to-the-sun-why-won-t-parker-solar-probe-melt