Webb Wonderland

Kaohsiung | Learning Through the Looking Glass

Building the Impossible

High-Level Project Summary

I created an interactive text-adventure game where you star as the leader of the James Webb Space Telescope project. It isn't the full game, but rather the first stage (covers roughly 1996–2003 in the telescope's development). You will be in charge of what the telescope is for, and will be tested on the knowledge that you gain throughout the game.The challenge is about the telescope's abilities, and I believe that by *being* (even briefly) the person in charge of the JWST makes one gain a much greater understanding of *why* the telescope needs those abilities and, hopefully, stays with the player more.

Link to Final Project

https://webbwonderland.github.io/

Link to Project "Demo"

https://bit.ly/webbwonderland-demo

Detailed Project Description

  • Software: Twine (twinery.org) — open source software for interactive text-based games
  • Benefits: Role-playing game including both key information about the JWST and lighthearted moments (you really need coffee)
  • How to play: Click the blue links at the bottom of each passage to advance! Think about your choices; they'll affect how the game goes in subtle but important ways.

Space Agency Data

All images are sourced from https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasawebbtelescope/albums/, especially The Story of Webb.


Much information was gathered from NASA's blog posts on Webb, https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/, especially information on the materials used to make the telescope!

Hackathon Journey

I'll just copy and paste my dedication from the game:





Other thanks I need to give: the Flickr repository of Webb images that I went through to grasp a sense of the history of this project; the Wikipedia page for the JWST; my coding teacher, for helping me set up the main and demo webpages; and my parents, for everything.


I was inspired to choose this challenge due to my own fascination with space — my dad reveres Hubble and I grew up looking at images of far-off galaxies. JWST is fascinating to me because unlike what most say, it's not a replacement to Hubble — I think of it as more like a sibling, detecting in a different light range. What they find together might help us finally piece together our whole universe.

References

  • HST & Beyond Report, 1996 (https://www.stsci.edu/stsci/org/hst-and-beyond-report.pdf)
  • Opening photo: https://live.staticflickr.com/4179/34537748622_91ce537d39_k.jpg

Tags

#software, #game, #jwst

Learning Through the Looking Glass

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is the largest, most powerful, and most complex space science telescope ever built. Your challenge is to develop a game to help people learn about the James Webb Space Telescope’s amazing capabilities.