High-Level Project Summary
The challenge we had was to make a "space biology superhero," a creature that would be able to withstand the extremes of space. Our team brainstormed and came up with a creature that was a combination of multiple organisms, each with features that we know would be helpful for space travel. We developed a sort of prototype for the creature in the form of a simple 2D sketch, from that original sketch our team modeled a 3D version of the creature. We wrote detailed descriptions about each of the adaptations, coded an interactive model, and created a website to host all of our work. It is important because it showcases the ways in which we can make space travel easier for humans in the future.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
Our project is a website with a number of features. Besides providing a nice introduction and summary to our project, it also makes for a great place to store the animations for this project, as well as showcasing all of the Python used to make the interactive model. All you have to do is click on the different buttons on the website and it will take you to wherever you need to go, and show you everything we’ve made for this project. The benefits of this is that it allows us to effectively and easily show all the hard work we put into the project. We hoped to achieve exactly what we did; an interactive website with models and animations that help teach viewers about our imaginary creature, the Spatium Cimex. We used Cinema 4D, Python, Carnegie Mellon University Graphics Library, Weebly, and our personal laptops to create this project.
Space Agency Data
Within our project, we used some of the pictures taken from different NASA Spacy Agencies for the backgrounds of our videos, it helped to put our project in perspective in regards to space in general. Some of the photos and documentation of different asteroids really helped to inspire the usage of asteroids as the home of our creature. We also used statistics from NASA for the temperature of space, and the surface of asteroids.
Hackathon Journey
We would describe our Hackathon Journey as a fun, yet challenging learning experience. We learned a great deal about how Libraries work in Python, as well as how to create a website and how to share Python code. Our team chose this challenge because we read the description for it and were immediately inspired. All of us had numerous great ideas right off the bat so we decided to go with it. We took a very “divide and conquer” type approach to this project, splitting up the tasks of coding and animating among our group members. We were stumped by numerous challenges during this process, mostly relating to sharing Python, but with some brainstorming and outside help we were able to figure it out. We would like to thank the members of our group for making this an amazing experience for all involved, as well as the staff of NASA who help to set up this event every year. This is our team’s fourth year of participating in the Space Apps Challenge, and every year we enjoy it more and more.
References
We used the Carnegie Melon University Computer Science Academy Sandbox to code our project, including the use of their digital library to make the Python easier to code and to understand. We also used Weebly to publish our website, and used their large array of digital images to help build our website. For the animation segment, our team used the program Cinema 4D to 3D model and animate. We also used images taken by NASA for backgrounds in the videos.