High-Level Project Summary
First, We developed a space game called space jetpack that helps the users to know information about James Webb telescope through a funny way.Second, Our goal is to increase public awareness of the James Webb Space Telescope, so we created a game to aid in that endeavor.Third, Because most kids spend a lot of time playing video games without getting anything out of it, our game will get kids interested in astronomy and teach them more.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
Our idea is to make a space game that helps to give information to the users in a way that helps them to enjoy learning. We made this game using scratch platform to help us speed up the process of making the game. We chose some main information about the James Webb Space Telescope(JWST) and put them with the background of the game. The game shows an astronaut who tries to escape from the dangers on each level by building a rocket. There is a rocket platform that spawns in the beginning of each level and the player has to collect rocket parts and puts them on the platform to complete the rocket. There are six stages for the rocket and after it has been built the player has to fill the fuel tank by collecting fuel that drops from destroying some meteorites . The player can collect the fuel before building the rocket but there is some enemies that reduces the shield of the suit during contact with the astronaut. If the shield breaks, the player loses but there as a laser shooter that enables the player to defend himself from these enemies and also break meteorites. After the player refuel the rocket, he will be able to go to the next level after contact with the rocket. There are five planets in the game and on each planet, there is a paragraph of information of about five lines. For the first planet, we wrote an introduction about JWST such as the launch date. In the second planet, we wrote about the optical capabilities and the mirror of the telescope. And in the third planets, we explained briefly about the orbit of the telescope and the fourth planet talks about the expected performance of the telescope. The fifth planet gives more information about the telescope as an ending for the game. The game is developed to help kids or anyone who plays the game to benefit from playing and also learn in a funny way!! We hope to make learning enjoyable as many people hates learning in schools as it is boring and at the end achieve low grades. So, this will help people to love learning and develop an idea to make learning a funny process!!
Space Agency Data
We used a video that explained many things about James Webb Space Telescope from the video library of NASA. This video stated that the telescope will be 1.5 kilometers away from the Earth and told us the mission's goal that we used as information to demonstrate them to the players of the game. Here is the videos link:
https://viewspace.org/video_library/videos/1261-655335865?tags=1639
We also used a pdf that talked about the mechanism of the building of the telescope from the telescope's site on NASA. It told us about the way that the telescope's mirror was gathered by and some materials that were used to build it. This helped us in identifying the structure of the telescope's mirror that we mentioned as information to the users. The link of the pdf is:
https://webb.nasa.gov/content/observatory/ote/mirrors/index.html#:~:text=Webb%20is%20what%20is%20known,a%20wider%20field%20of%20view
Hackathon Journey
We loved the experience of teamwork to solve a challenge that could benefit the next generations. We learned many information about the James Webb Space Telescope and also we learned to cooperate as a team and try to solve the problems between the team to achieve a better solution for the main challenge.
All of the team members have an experience in software so the challenge requirements encouraged us to choose this challenge. We have used Scratch platform to build up the codes for developing the game and worked together by dividing tasks as parts of the game and then joining them together to finish our project as a complete game. I would love to thank engineer Mostafa Essawy and engineer Mahmoud Fared for helping us to find a solution for the challenge and without them, we might have not completed the challenge which will lead to our failure to join the hackathon.
References
We used some data from NASA's open databases as mentioned above and here are their links:
https://viewspace.org/video_library/videos/1261-655335865?tags=1639
https://webb.nasa.gov/content/observatory/ote/mirrors/index.html#:~:text=Webb%20is%20what%20is%20known,a%20wider%20field%20of%20view
We also got information from a Wikipedia site that gives information about the telescope and here is the link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope
We used a pre-made project that we improved to satisfy our challenge and its link on scratch is:
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/343667308/
We also used Scratch platform to develop the project as it eases the way to make games and here is the link of the platform:
https://scratch.mit.edu/
This is a link that enables us to download scratch projects as an executable file, it helped us to make the game in the from of an executable file:
https://packager.turbowarp.org/
Tags
#Scratch , #Games , #Space.