High-Level Project Summary
Our project provides a user friendy, easily digestable way for players of all ages to learn about James Webb and its amazing capabilities. We created an app that is designed for all age groups to have an interactive learning experience that will help them learn in a fun way. We provided the story of James Webb, from is creation of individual parts, to its launch, and its objective to take pictures of the cosmos. We made various 3D models of both Webb's entirety, and its most important individual parts. Our project solves the challenge, as we created a fun, interactive, and informative game that all ages can play and enjoy to learn about Webb.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
Our project is a game that aims to teach people about the James Webb Telescope. We developed our game in the Scratch 3.0 coding language, and used various 3D modeling softwares such as Tinkercad and MagicaVoxel to create and render our 3D models.
The goal of our project was to provide a fun and interactice way to let people of all ages learn and experience what the James Webb Telescope has to offer. Our project tells the story of James Webb, going through the creation of the actual pieces, to its transportation, all the way to its launch and continued success taking pictures of the cosmos. We wanted to tell this story in a way that is easily understood by anyone who wishes to learn and understand the immense power of this telescope.
We have several applications within our program to display this. First, we go into detail showing all the intricate and carefully designed pieces that make up the James Webb. This is meant to provide players with a visual representation of how delicate and carefully designed each piece is, as it is also accompanied by a 3D model.
Furthermore, our game offers a way for players to visually see the increase in power from past telescopes like the Hubble and WISE to James Webb. Players are provided with several pictures of the same galaxy or nebula, imaged by different telescopes. They are to choose which picture is taken by Webb, and which is taken by its predecessors. This is usually quite easy to tell, and not a huge challenge, but it allows players to see the difference of image quality between James Webb and telescopes before it. James Webb's pictures are much more detailed and clear, which is illustrated by this little mini-game.
Overall, our game works to provide players with facts and information about the scientific feat that James Webb is, in a manner that is digestable to everyone, even children! This game is meant to be both fun and informative, and we believe we achieved this with our idea and application.
Our 3D Models
https://www.tinkercad.com/things/4Ew1Ps7tmUb-powerful-gogo - James Webb Telescope
https://www.tinkercad.com/things/2r2uwZuf3Es-grand-jarv-kieran - Primary Mirror
https://www.tinkercad.com/things/hHu9Rop3vue-sunshield - Sunshield
https://www.tinkercad.com/things/jyl3AOnD6HB-fabulous-blorr - Spacecraft Bus
Space Agency Data
We used Space Agency Data in a variety of ways throughout our challenge. We could not learn about James Webb and begin to understand its purpose and how it works without using a large amount of data. One of our goals of this project was to create a central hub that one could get information about all the different pieces of the Webb telescope in one place. We first had to research all the different parts and pieces that we planned to highlight in our game. This included all three mirrors, the spacecraft bus, the trim flap, the sunshield and the solar array. Learning about all these pieces involved going through many different NASA websites that detailed each piece.
Furthermore we used Space Agency data for various pictures that James Webb has taken, as well as infographics and other learning tools. We used some of NASA's 3D models of James Webb to provide inspiration to make 3D models of our own. We were able to find great models of each piece of Webb that we chose to highlight, which was very helpful in providing our models with accuracy.
Hackathon Journey
Our hackathon journey started at Magikid Diamond Bar, where our 6 kid team was formed. We have the mentor, Kevin or Mr. Chicken, Cyrus, Ethan, Frank, Damian and Chris. We started off a month before the hacakthon date, learning all about different space related topics ranging from distant stars, various telescopes, rocket launches, and microscopic organisms such as tardigrades. We had tons of fun exploring the different challenges from past years, and doing our best to solve them leading up to this years hackathon.
Once the challenges for this year released, we had some difficulty deciding on a challenge as a team. We becamse stuck between "Learning through the Looking Glass" and "Twinkle Twinkle." We liked Twinkle Twinkle because of the freedom the challenge offered, and the distant stars proved very interesting for us. Learning Through the Looking Glass was interesting to us, as many of us had lots of prior knowledge and information about James Webb Telescope. We found the advanced technology and the crystal clear images of the cosmos to be too interesting to pass up on, For this reason, we ended up choosing Learning Through the Looking Glass as our cilhallenge.
Our approach to solving this challenge involved teamwork, failures, perserverence and creativity. In the two days, October 1 and 2, we had to make the project, research our topic, program it, create 3D models, film and edit a video. We had about 17 collective hours of class time to work on this, which proved to be a challenge.
During this development process we had many setbacks and challenges. As a group, we found it challenging to stay on track and focused throughout the whole 8 hour day. We took many breaks, stayed hydrated, and had many snacks to try and stay productive and focused. Even with all this, it was still challenging to stay focused and productive throughout the whole day. If we had the opportunity to this again, we would try harder to stay on track and get less distracted. Another challenge presented was that our idea was a bit ambitious for our coding abilities and time constraint. We had the amazing idea of our game including a way for players to build the James Webb Telescope by clicking the individual pieces and placing them in their respective place. If we had more time more time to complete this challenge, it would have been a great addition to our app.
Overall, our team's experience with the space apps challenge was very interesting and a fun time. If we could do it over we would try to be more time efficient so we could flush out our idea more. It was an amazing learning experience and we all look forward to trying again in the future.
References
https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/observatory/instruments/nircam.html - Detailing of Webb's NIRCam
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasawebbtelescope/ - Flickr gallery of Webb's photos
https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/ - Details Mid-Infrared-Instrument
https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/satellites/jwst/about.asp - Canadian Space Agency James Webb description
https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/satellites/jwst/webb-hubble-successor.asp - Canadian Space Agency detailing Webb vs Hubble
https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/about/comparisonWebbVsHubble.html - NASA detailing Webb vs Hubble
https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages - Documentation of Webb's first images
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/webb/observatory/index.html - Detailing of Webb's observatory
https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/gallery-space/en/ - Kids website for pictures
https://webb.nasa.gov/content/observatory/bus.html - Detailing of Spacecraft Bus
Tools we used
Scratch - https://scratch.mit.edu/
Tinkercad - https://www.tinkercad.com/
MagicaVoxel - https://ephtracy.github.io/
Tags
#JamesWebb #WebbForever #Telescope #game #Hubble #WISE #NIRCam #SpaceApt