High-Level Project Summary
Lightyear UVG developed a video game idea inspired on the first cat to ever go to outer space, Félicette. This fictional game tells the story of how Félicitte -The Superhero Cat- was sent on a mission to find water on Mars. However, after a meteorite shower, Félicette's mission changes and has to develop new abilities in order to survive the harsh conditions of outer space. This game manages to solve the problem since it allows users to explore the environmental stresses of space travel and helps them understand how diverse organisms deal with this. It is important since it provides a fun way for young people to learn about certain hardships found in space; such as extreme gravity.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
Félicette's Adventure was created with the objective of being able to teach kids and young people about the harsh conditions organisms have to endure in outer space. This interactive game is able to show how extreme gravity, disrupted sleep, limited supplies and access to medical care can affect an organism. In this case, Félicette and the player are able to endure these hardships by acquiring abilities and superpowers obtained by fighting off space enemies. These enemies are often inspired by real life unicellular organisms that have unique characteristics that allow them to not be affected as much by radiation, for example.
As a team, Lightyear UVG hopes to make Félicette's Adventure players interested in the environmental stresses of space travel; specially considering space travel is not as simple or as easy as people often think it is. Astronauts are the true superheroes.
This idea was created using Canva and Procreate. These apps have tools and designs that allow people to be creative and innovative. Being able to draw sketches with vector brushes in Procreate helped the team create stunning graphics for the final project.
Space Agency Data
For this project, Lightyear UVG used:
- NASA Solar System Exploration: The information used from NASA is the scientific foundation for the fictional situations developed throughout the storyline of the video game. It allowed the team to figure out which superhero abilities Félicette needed in order to survive the hardships space travel.
Hackathon Journey
The 2022 Space Apps Challenge experience was overall really good and exciting. This project allowed the team members of Lightyear UVG to connect and be able to be creative together. We were able to share our knowledge and ideas in order to come up with a fun and innovative solution for the chosen challenge.
Throughout this experience, we learned the importance of being able to access knowledge and information. In this project, we wanted to make a video game that allowed kids and young people to explore and learn more about outer space alongside the hardships involved with space travel. This was extremely rewarding since most information online is not catered to kids and/or may be difficult to understand.
As a team, we decided to choose this challenge since we truly believe in interactive learning. Often times, learning may be difficult since not everyone learns the same way; reading may work for some, and playing an educational video game may work for others.
In order to work efficiently and complete this project, as a team we decided to use an agile-teamwork approach. This means we often shared ideas and gave each other feedback in order to improve what we were developing. As a result, our designs and ideas were often changed and improved. This approach also allowed us to resolve setbacks and challenges since we were always discussing about solving problems and improving our ideas within our project. Communication was the key to everything.
We, as a team, would personally like to thank our college professors for motivating us to create and innovate.
References
- https://www.canva.com/policies/free-media-license-agreement-2022-01-03/
- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/felicette-first-cat-space-finally-gets-memorial-180974062/
- https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/
Tags
#space #cats #felicette #superhero #procreate #nasa #guatemala