CosmoGEX

Vilnius | Learning Through the Looking Glass

YourJW - Learn to Launch

High-Level Project Summary

YourJW is a game designed to educate children about the James Webb Space Telescope. This game uses fun and educational challenges to give information to kids. With its interactive functions, players can get information and apply the knowledge, at the same time. With this, players not only learn what JWST is, but they also learn its structure and different technologies behind it. YourJW is significant because it provides a simple and amusing way of understanding complex concepts, it helps players connect with technology and give a sense of accomplishment while building the telescope and launching it into space.

Link to Final Project

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/12XDXkOo7Q01Vw4q84qJuTlLzG4Ge4Hq3?usp=sharing

Link to Project "Demo"

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/12XDXkOo7Q01Vw4q84qJuTlLzG4Ge4Hq3?usp=sharing

Detailed Project Description

What exactly does YourJW do and how does it work?

The main objective of this game is to build your own James Webb so you can launch it into space. The player starts with an outline of the telescope, without its parts visible; the primary goal is to unlock those parts to complete building the telescope. The game is a collection of challenges divided into levels, which are fun, witty, and of course, provide information about the telescope’s function and structure. Completing each level unlocks a part of a telescope, and those parts can be used to assemble it step by step. Each level is modeled around important information about the structure, function, or ability of the telescope, for example, the cooling system, camera, or mirrors.

Examples:

Cooling level

This level is modeled around an idea to introduce engineering and the importance of the cooling system of the telescope. In this level, players have to solve a maze, by taking a Helium drop from one part of the telescope to another. This represents a cooling down system of the telescope and teaches kids its importance.

Picture level

James Webb is a successor of the Hubble Telescope. It can go further than the bubble and provide better images as well. With this level, we wanted to illustrate the improvement between the two technologies and give information about the advanced abilities of James Webb.

Benefits and what do we hope to achieve?

The benefit of this game is that it not only teaches about the abilities of the telescope but it also teaches children about its structure, and how it's built and gives information about crucial parts that are used to build and work this amazing telescope. Levels are fun and educational at the same time, after completing each challenge player unlocks a part, which gives a sense of accomplishment. Information and part that was received now were used by assembling the telescope, so there is space in this game to apply the knowledge in a fun way too.

We think that this game will be an amusing way to educate and entertain children and introduce science, and engineering behind amazing space technologies and discoveries. We hope players will feel motivated to complete challenges, learn and build their own telescope.

Tools

We used Stencyl, which is a java based platform to create mobile games. We used this tool to create the demonstrated levels of the game.

We used Figma to create designs for the game, and photoshop to create some of the pictures and art used in the game.

Space Agency Data

Since we wanted to model levels of specific functions and abilities of the telescope, we did extensive research behind the technology and specific parts of this telescope. Resources and websites by Nasa and European Space Agency dedicated to this mission were used to gain a deeper understanding of the technology, its abilities, and its importance.

We used the Goddard space flight center website for to gain more in-depth knowledge about the cooling system.

We used the European Space Agency website (https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Webb) for more in-depth information about the telescope.

https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages- was to research the pictures taken by JWSP.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/multimedia/index.html was used for pictures taken by Hubble.

Hackathon Journey

This hackathon was our first experience. Participating was fun and productive. This felt sort of a test of our abilities and skills as a team, as creative students, and as future software developers. Many things went very differently than we imagined they would go, but honestly solving problems while being stuck was one of the most exciting parts of this journey. We learned a lot about James Webb, advanced space technologies, game development, and most importantly ourselves. We realized we still have a long way to go in terms of learning software development to be able to make our creative ideas into reality, but by solving problems we also realized that we have the ability to come up with a solution even if the problem seems kind of impossible at first.

All three of us are fascinated by space and were interested in James Webb from the beginning. The pictures and discoveries it provided were exciting to follow, but we were also interested in the behind-the-scenes. How was the telescope built? What parts went to it? So we decided to use our curiosity and make a game about it. Our inspiration was our own curiosity behind the engineering and we hope that with this project we can provide curious kids with answers in an entertaining way about the telescope.

The obvious Thank yous go to the mentors and organizers! (and to our laptops for being able to withstand ten hundred different tabs opened at the same time)