High-Level Project Summary
The Challenge was to build a game that would help more people see the amazing capabilities of the James Webb Space Telescope. Just like how unique and advanced the JWST is we wanted our game to reflect some of that uniqueness so we split our game into three sub-games. Upon winning each game you get a part of the JWST and on completing all three games and finding some of the easter eggs in the game you will have all the parts to build your own JWST.The whole purpose of building the game was to make learning about the JWST a fun and interactive experience for the novices. And that is exactly what we managed to do with these three games - Comparito, In Search of THE BANG and Focus on ME.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
The project was build with the sole aim of providing a fun and interactive learning experience for anyone interested in learning about JWST. To make our game more unique and stand to out among the rest of the games we divided it into 3 mini-games each one contributing to the larger picture in some way just like the parts of the JWST works together to provide us with all these images.
We decided to make the best use of all the data and resources that were available to us and fashioned some of these data to obtain brand new and improved versions of the usual comparison game. This is how we ended up creating Comparito. Most people are visual learners and respond faster and better to visual stimulations and this was exactly our focus while designing Comparito, the players will be shown two images one that is taken by the JWST and another by one of its predecessors. They’ll be asked to select which of these they think was taken by the JWST hints will be given in each round and by completing all the rounds the players will get a good understanding of all the ways in which JWST is better than its predecessors. After submitting the answer in each round a window will appear showing the correct answer and displaying the functionalities of the JWST that caused such distinctions to occur.
Learning is the easiest when it becomes interactive and that was our goal while developing the second mini-game In Search of THE BANG. We created an interactive pov type of game that lets you control the story unfolding by making the choices for your characters. The conversations and choices in the game revolve around the JWST it’s an origin story, technologies used, etc. It provides users with a more pragmatic knowledge about JWST by introducing various quizzes and fun little quips in between.
For the third and the final mini-game we wanted to introduce something entertaining and lighthearted, something simple to make the players curious about the working of the JWST, and Focus on ME checks all of these criteria. JWST clarity is unprecedented and was unseen in the previous era. This game brings attention to this important aspect of JWST.
The main thing we hope to achieve is to make a game that is impactful and entertaining and can help people learn more about JWST
Space Agency Data
We have used resources from NASA’s website to get data about the telescope and also the images have been used from the WISE gallery on NASA’s website. It has helped our project in showing the differences between the images as well the data has helped to represent the features of telescope effectively in our game
Hackathon Journey
While choosing the challenge for this Hackathon, “Learning through Looking Glass” in particular stood out to us because of the Jame Webb Space Telescope which has a unique and superior design and functionality to all its predecessors. Hence the quest to build a game that will teach people about the incredible capabilities of the James Webb Space Telescope had officially begun. At first, we were stuck in the planning phase, I.e how would we represent the complex but amazing functions of the James Webb Space Telescope, through a fun and creative game. We came across a lot of data given on different websites, which gave us more ideas making us stuck in the planning phase, as we wanted to choose an idea that would utilize the maximum data available. We even thought of changing the challenge but the features of the James Webb Space Telescope were too good to be neglected. At last, we came to an idea that was a combination of all the ideas we had as well as using as much data available. Once the idea was set, the rest of the journey was a very smooth ride, mostly because most of the resources were readily available on the internet and we made a plan as soon as the idea was set. The toughest part was designing the UI part of the game which we overcame with the help of a few online tutorials. We would like to thank NASA for providing us with this opportunity to “make space” and expand our horizons.
References
Tags
#software #nasa #game #jwst #isro #win #beginner