Just in Space

Cairo | Build a Space Biology Superhero

Just in Space

High-Level Project Summary

We developed a game where players create a ‘perfect’ organism that travels freely in space. The organism is characterized by imitating all other organisms’ strongest points to survive in space. The players can experience this arduous, yet exciting, journey from the organism’s point of view.The game would enable many people, especially the youth, to experience what hardships face humanity when sending people to space. It would also teach them about different organisms, and how they adapted to their environments. This would promote the youth’s growth, and might light some cinders of discovery in their brains, which could very well make them space pioneers one day.

Link to Final Project

https://github.com/AliHashish/Just_in_Space

Link to Project "Demo"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IEcOfukE3o

Detailed Project Description

Our game begins with the story of our hero losing his toy, Teddy the Bear, and starting the journey of searching for it throughout the planets. There are four levels in our game, each one with a different challenge and a different educational value.

On the very first level, our hero, wanting to travel out of Earth, faces the danger of meteors. He, with the help of the player, will need to dodge them to travel safely to outer space.

On the second level, our hero goes to Mars. One of the many dangers in Mars is its high degree of radiation, which damages the DNA and causes cancer. To survive, our hero will meet a bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans, one of the most radiation-resistant organisms and need to acquire the ability to repair his DNA from this bacterium. After doing this, our hero can now repair his DNA and advance to the next level.

On the third level, our hero goes to Uranus and finally finds Teddy the Bear. Unfortunately, he faces extreme cold due to its distance from the Sun. Our hero again needs assistance from Tardigrade and its ability to hibernate. After gaining this ability and surviving the extreme cold, he will return again to Earth.

On the last level, after our hero returns back home, he finds it hard to adapt himself to the Earth's gravity. Due to the lack of gravity in space, he suffered muscle loss. Poor hero!

We believe that this game provides a unique educational experience to the children and gets them excited for space exploration and reading more about space risks. We developed our game using C# and Unity as the game engine.

Space Agency Data

First, to get a general idea about space travel and risks it comes with, we read this article from the Canadian Space Agency and then this article from NASA. We then used this data from NASA to know more about the science behind these risks. These articles and this data helped us greatly in developing the game, as we knew what the risks are and how we can incorporate them into our game. As our curiosity was still unsatiated, we delved deeper and read this article to know more about the effects of space travel about microorganisms. While developing the second level in our game, which consists of Mars radiation as the challenge, this article from the Canadian Space Agency greatly helped us. Finally, in the last level, which consists of Muscle Loss as the challenge, we were inspired by this article from the Canadian Space Agency.

Hackathon Journey

As participants of the NASA Space Apps hackathon, we were able to gain a lot of experience during the hackathon, starting from the ideation phase up to making our final presentation. The hackathon encouraged each of us to think critically, brainstorm different ideas, and get out of their comfort zone. For most of us, we did not know there existed so many challenges related with the space, but after we read about the challenges and explored different resources provided by NASA and other several space agencies, we were able to broaden our knowledge in the field of space and exploit our passion with problem-solving in building a project that’s educational, exciting, and entertaining for all its users.

We chose the “Build a Space Biology Superhero” challenge due to our passion for technology and biology. We wanted to educate people about the different space travel stresses faced by astronauts and other organisms and excite them about space exploration. By having more space enthusiasts, we will be having more space researchers and scientists who are willing to contribute to our understanding of the universe and help improve the future of our universe. To this end, we decided to build a video game, through which the player will be able to experience the arduous, yet exciting, journey of space flight through the eyes of our developed space superhero, imitating different organisms’ strong points and mechanisms that help them survive in space.

Our team faced so many challenges, one of which was the sickness of one of our members, making her not able to attend the hackathon days. Another challenge was the limited time we had to build such a challenging game that combines different features of organisms in an exciting, story-telling plot. These challenges required great team coordination and working tirelessly.

Finally, we would like to thank Professor Mona Taher from Cairo University’s Faculty of Engineering for helping us understand the process of bone loss in space and comparing such process to that of bone decalcification, helping us design our last level of the game.