Awards & Nominations
Innovators has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Global Nominee
‘’Outer Space’’
High-Level Project Summary
Our project “Outer Space” lets its users consume information about JWST in a fun and efficient way. We did our research about what people prefer in the gaming genre and realized that most people play survival type of games which includes lots of challenges to overcome. We think that by making this space survival game, many people will be interested to learn more about the telescope’s amazing abilities.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
Our challenge was to develop a game that would help people learn about the amazing capabilities of the James Webb Space Telescope. Despite the fact that we did not manage to develop the application in this short time, we have a prototype according to which it is possible to make an application in the near future. After much thought, we came up with the idea of a prototype of such an application: Our game will be a survival game where one astronaut will be launched into space with James Webb's satellite. where they are tasked to collect information and bring it to Earth after completing the mission. From the astronaut's point of view, the player will see the stars and galaxies that the telescope itself perceives with its information, but during this time the astronaut will face many challenges and have to overcome them (with certain instructions). But along with these challenges, they will receive information, and when they land on Earth, the mission will be considered complete. This game idea directly answers the challenge that was provided. Our game idea is an innovative way for people to learn JWST in a more fun way than ever before!
Space Agency Data
https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/bodyinspace
https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/home/F_Living_in_Space.html
We used real-life data from the ‘’NASA’’ website to learn more about what challenges astronauts come across in space, and what problems they have to solve, to write what our fictional character would have to face in their space shift. we also used data from JWST to learn what to include in our game in order for it to be easily and efficiently consumed by the player. Pictures taken from JWST inspired our whole idea of the game.
Hackathon Journey
Our hackathon journey started when my team discovered the ‘’NASA Space Apps Challenge” and decided to participate in it, considering the fact that we have previous experience in solving global problems through technology so we were easily intrigued. At first, we couldn’t decide what to work on because there were many great options to choose from but finally, we decided that we wanted to explore game development and software. We chose the challenge "learning through looking glass” and started brainstorming ideas. There were a lot of them but we finally decided that we wanted to make a space survival type of game that would also help players learn more about JWST. Our main challenge was probably time. we had many ideas and game coding plans but we decided to only do the logo and a few app designs because we wanted to present a completed idea, rather than an incomplete and flawed app that wouldn’t show our view perfectly. We learned that we love working under time pressure. That made us more organized and we managed time perfectly by dividing tasks equally. That was a great achievement. By choosing this challenge we learned a lot about this telescope and we are definitely going to develop this game in the future because we loved the working process and the general idea of this challenge. We would like to thank the mentors of this project for being so patient with our constant questions. They did an amazing job helping us and being by our side even when it was late at night.
References
We mainly used official data published on the NASA website and those links are listed above. We created our app designs in https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop.html
Tags
#space #JWST #software #games #app