High-Level Project Summary
We developed a learning simulator in Scratch to teach our players about how stars’ appearances can change because of stellar variability. Stars can dim or brighten or look larger or smaller in the night sky, and these changes happen slowly over time. People cannot always see these changes because of how slowly they happen, but our simulator will show how these changes look and why they happen.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
"Sirius" is a lightcurve simulator built in Scratch to help players understand stellar variability (or changes to the stars). Since changes to stars can take several months to years, players may not notice the differences by looking at the night sky. In our simulator, players can use our time-lapse feature to speed up these changes. Through this feature, our players can better view stellar variability they may not notice in real-time.
We want our players to understand that the stars are luminous balls of gas that can significantly change in size, color, and even brightness. We want our players to realize that stars are constantly changing, even if we do not always perceive those changes.
Space Agency Data
We read the references on the resources page of this NASA challenge and realized that different types of stars have different light curve patterns. Those unique patterns are fascinating and can help characterize solar systems. It inspired us to use the brightness patterns to identify the stars and to make it an educational game app.
We researched and analyzed data from the TESS lightkurve tool to incorporate several typical patterns in our app. We used those patterns to change the brightness of stars and simulated the behavior of the corresponding star type.
With further development, our app could directly read real-time data from the lightkurve tool. Additionally, a star map could be constructed from real-time data from the NASA Predict the Sky API. The app could help researchers use the light curves data to discover new stars.
Hackathon Journey
Our Space Apps challenge was a fun and educational experience for our all-girls team. During our first hackathon, we were fortunate to have the experience of working in multiple roles (e.g., developers, educators, artists, etc.). Through teamwork, we worked through several problems that required our collective input and different perspectives.
We are very proud of our work. We hope our experience can inspire other girls to participate in STEAM and future NASA challenges.
This challenge was not that easy. There was a lot of coding, filming, and editing. The game often didn't work as expected, and we had to debug and fix the app's functionality constantly. We would resolve setbacks and challenges by working hard as a team. Emma did the research; Ashley worked on coding; Charlotte made the notes and wrote the project report; Chelsea created the demo video. We used spreadsheets to collaborate and share feedback on each other's work. This approach improved the work significantly and efficiently.
We want to thank our host, the Migikid Lab in San Jose, run by Joy and Peng, for providing accommodations for the whole event. We also would like to thank all the parents for their support.
References
- Cepheid Variables, https://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/questions/cepheids.html
- Cataclysmic variables, https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/objects/cataclysmic_variables.html
- Eclipsing binary stars, https://www.britannica.com/science/eclipse/Eclipsing-binary-stars
- Supernova Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova
- Dyson Sphere Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
- Introduction to light curves, https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/toolbox/timing1.html
- Lightkurve docs, https://docs.lightkurve.org/
- Lightcurve simulator, https://astro.unl.edu/classaction/animations/binaryvariablestars/lightcurve.html
- NASA Predict the Sky API, https://rapidapi.com/blog/directory/nasa-predict-sky/
- Stars GIFs, https://giphy.com/explore/stars
Tags
#game, #space, #star