High-Level Project Summary
Bituin is the Filipino term for the star. Filipinos are very fond of the stars. We always wanted to look at it. We even use tissue rolls as our "telescope" to view the things in the night sky such as the moon and the stars. But because of the limited equipment, we only know little about the stellar variability. That is why we developed an application that is informative and fun to use. We came up with the idea of showing how the stars change through an application to Filipino students, our main target audience. It solved the challenge in the sense that the app we developed is informative, entertaining, and easy to use. Tara! Tingnan natin ang mga bituin (Let's go! Let's look at the stars!)
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
The application that we worked on combines a lot of different fun features such as:
- Star News Feed (where people can post photos they captured and make interactions with other users)
- Star Calendar (which shows how the sky looked like at a specific date that is very much suitable for those who cannot use the third feature)
- a Telescope (which uses the phone's camera to look at the night sky and detect various constellations), Galaxy Editor (in which the user can design his/her galaxy, put different stars, planets, etc.)
- Virtual Reality Feature (which can be used with a VR Cardboard / VR Box to view different stars, galaxies, etc.)
- Mini game (from the concept of the game slither.io in which the player must consume other smaller stars and dominate the galaxy)
- Daily trivia (which pops up as the app opens and shows various about stars)
- a Live, Interactive Main UI Display (in which the user can zoom in on the different stars and know its description)
We hope to educate young students, particularly Filipino who are very fond of the stars. Most Filipino students belong to the lower sector of society meaning they can only afford mid-range smart phones but cannot afford to buy high-end telescopes for viewing the stars. That is why we came up with an app that allows users to view the night sky, particularly the stars using their mobile phones.
In editing the prototype of this application, we only used Adobe Photoshop Cs6 and Microsoft PowerPoint.
Space Agency Data
All the data that we used in knowing Stellar Variability came from NASA.
https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/toolbox/timing1.html
https://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/questions/cepheids.html
https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/W3Browse/all/gcvs.html
https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/tess/software.html
Hackathon Journey
Our Space Apps experience was extraordinary. We are a group of 1st-year seminarians from St. Peter's College Seminary training for the priestly vocation. NASA Space Apps was quite far from the field of our expertise since we are taking up the Bachelor of Arts Major in Philosophy. Despite that, it was a nice experience to get out of our comfort zones and try something new. We, seminarians, look to our Blessed Mother as the Star of the Morning. That is why we chose the challenge Twinkle Twinkle Little Star because every time we look at the stars, it reminds us of our Blessed Mother who always guides us and leads us to her Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Our approach to this project is quite simple and not so complicated. Here in the seminary, we have limited resources and we also have specific activities for each hour of the entire day, so it was quite a challenge to find time to work on this project, but we managed to do so. We would like to thank our professor, Dr. Melodee De Castro, Ph.D. for giving us her full support as well as the priest formators of our seminary who allowed us to join in this activity. We would also like to thank all our brothers who shared with us their suggestions, comments, and ideas. We would like to thank our Mother Mary for guiding us throughout the building of this project. Most especially, the Trinitarian God who sustained us and continually gives us wisdom, inspiration, and hope.
References
All the sources (photos, etc.) we used came from the various public domain of the internet.
Tags
#SPCS #Bituin