GigaCharbs

Rio de Janeiro | Learning Through the Looking Glass

Stelarium

High-Level Project Summary

The tabletop game puts its players into a galaxy exploration ride through the universe. Decide your strategy smartly and answer the questions right to be the first to see beyond. Receive useful hints to help you reach your objective and learn even more about space. Invite friends and family to test your knowledge and glimpse the wonders of the stars.Our game does solve the problem once proposed to us because it intends a way of learning focused on children so it can easily share spacial knowledge.The meaning of making this tabletop is a way of helping information related to space get into children's vocabulary and encourage them .

Link to Final Project

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1KPMWS-Two-thYNaBnubIFvr9ZO-x_9Dc?usp=sharing

Link to Project "Demo"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usCJOaPdtqM

Detailed Project Description

Stelarium is a tabletop game focused on space exploration through famous telescopes. With a maximum of 4 players, each representing a different telescope and pawn color, it is an excellent choice to have some time with family and friends. Everyone starts at the Milky Way, our galaxy, and then decides which of the other 8 to explore. Other galaxies are light-years away from ours, organized by distance, after a certain amount of rounds you can reach it and receive points.

In order to help reach them, every round, on their turn, the participants receive a trivia card about space, which ranges from level 1 to 3 and decreases the number of rounds yet needed by its respective level. Also, if you miss one, it takes more rounds, depending on the card level.

Every time you answer a question right or if you miss a level 3, you will receive a card box with one useful hint to answer a question you can get.

At the beginning of the game, all galaxies have a value of 5 points, after being explored once, and subsequently, they give 1 less point than before, at a minimum of 2 points. The game ends when every contestant explores all galaxies. After the counting of points, the winner is revealed.

Produced within the Gimp, our game has a vertical model, whose spawn of the players is represented by the Milky Way and in front of it several unexplored galaxies to discover. Andromeda, Cigar galaxy, Pinwheel, Sombrero, Whirlpool, NGC 1300, Tadpole, and the distant and immense Hoag Object.

As a Trivia game, it benefits our community by making them interested in space exploration and its value to society. When you think about space, everything seems so hard and complex that, many times, people don’t go further to enhance their knowledge of this subject. Considering how it works, we plan to achieve especially the younger generation and influence them to become future astronauts and even contributors to Mars colonization.

Space Agency Data

Information got from the UNITED STATES FEDERAL SPACE AGENCY(NASA), telescopes, and galaxy data came all from the NASA site.

Hackathon Journey

Our experience was very fun and tiring, but for me what was most important was what we learned. This was our first time participating in a hackathon, and it was a hell of a ride! We were almost all the time in meetings trying to finish everything. Our biggest challenge was getting all the cards and the tabletop made. Our designer was working on a very old computer and every image was taking a lot to export.

We came up with the idea of the card game because all of us liked card games, and we thought it would help people get interested in learning more about the satellites!