High-Level Project Summary
We have created an idea for a game, especially for teenagers, so that they know the James Webb telescope, how it works and the great qualities it has. The game is an interactive story about the construction and launch of the telescope that using minigames explains it's history and then has another chapter where the player can use the telescope and calibrate it so he/she can obtain good pictures of some interesting stars, planets and constellations in space.In this way we can motivate and teach young people and also any person open to learn about this telescope, which seeams to be discovering very important things since it was launched in 2021 Christmas.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
For this project we have created a game that aims to teach in an accessible way what the James Webb Telescope (JWST) is and how it works.
To do this we have spent these two days working on the design of the video game, which is the most important thing for a game, and gives the idea for the subsequent development of the application.
First of all, we did a very complete search on how the telescope works and what its parts are, as well as the tests that were done to send it into space.
Next, we documented ourselves on how the entire sequence of the pre-launch and launch of the telescope inside the Ariane 5 rocket went.
Finally we devised an idea for our video game, which will consist of three very well differentiated episodes with easy mini-games and which will be aimed above all at young people, over 8 years old, but also at anyone willing to learn interactively about the history of the telescope and then have the opportunity to use it in a simulation.
The video game is called GoldenEye because the telescope has 18 hexagonal mirrors disposed in a circular way and so the NASA scientists call the main mirrors golden eye. Our game would make an animation and personification of the golden eye in order to create the main character of the game, GoldenEye itself!
The three episodes of the game are about:
- The first episode will be about how the telescope was constructed. It will explain the telescope parts and what are they for and how were they tested in space conditions to assure they work well.
- The second episode will be about the preps for the launch and the launch itself, along with the process that the telescope made in order to work well for the science missions it needs to do.
- The third episode will need the knowledges of the first and second in order to answer questions to unlock the steering wheels of each one of the mirrors.
Space Agency Data
In order to think about this idea for an interactive game, we inspired and learn all the details of the JWST history using the gallery Image Galeries Webb/NASA provided in the resources folder by the NASA. This gallery helped us a lot because there are a lot of photos, very well classified, and some of them with detailed descriptions about what happened in that moment or why that part of the telescope shown in the photo is important.
We also used the James Webb Space Telescope web in order to learn about recent news or achievements made by the telescope.
If we had time to fully develop the game, we would use the WebbPSF library in order to code the last part of the game, where the player uses the telescope in order to calibrate its mirrors and see a non blurred image. In this library we can make the correct convolutions in order to make a part of the picture look like one mirror is not correctly oriented.
We have read the documentation for the WebbPSF and also the FITS software packages docs to find out how they work and in this way be able to design the game based on this knowing, and also because if we develop the game we will clearly use them.
Hackathon Journey
Our experience in this Hackaton was quite incredible. We got to meet a lot of people, in our same situation, in a lot of cases interested in the same as us, so that's an attribute which made the different teams in Barcelona connect with each other.
We also were helped and inspired by the mentors and organizers of the local event. They have been so attentive and serviceable to us. They helped us with techniques to add value to our solution, so that we understood what our potential audience, who would use our game, needed. And we even did a mini yoga session!
We learnt a lot of things about the James Webb telescope and we really challenged ourselves with time, and with the problems that were appearing in the meanwhile.
We chose this challenge because we are students finishing the Mathematics and Software Engineering double degree and we like to design apps, or games. We believe in the importance of making a deep effort in the design of the project, it's the most important part, and we thought we had to use these two days in this part, because if a project doesn't have a good structure we can't start coding for it.
So we spent a lot of time discussing about how the game would be and then making the mock up of the project.
References
We used Google presentations in order to make our demo.
We used images from ©Louise Perreaudin for ArianeGroup in order to illustrate the animation of the telescope.
We also used the logo of the JWST, the NASA Space Apps Challenge and some images of Ariane 5, the construction of the telescope and taken by the JWST.
We made a research about how the JWST works in some articles and videos.
Like this video about the mirrors, this one about their material. This article about the telescope.
This web to write a value proposition for our project.
And used this web to make the Mock Up of the game.
Tags
#videogames, #games, #telescope, #JWST, #JamesWebb, #fun, #design, #software