High-Level Project Summary
The main purpose of our challenge was to help people understand that the stars in the night sky are always changing, but usually too slowly or by too little for the eye to see. We developed a user-friendly application that can be used as an education tool. It allows the user to be informed more about the way stars change through time and also check their knowledge on this information. As it can be used from different ages, our tool has a huge impact on many people. It can be used as an educational tool at schools in order to inspire more students be involved in the space field, it can be used by individual amateurs who are really interested in star variations .
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
We built a game in python (pygame) that contains information about stellar variation and offers the opportunity to test your knowledge through quizzes. The most important asset of our application is the fact that it is addressed on students, people who are interested in expanding their knowledge about stellar variation. Our information tool can also be used by Space Agency’s or companies’ employees who would like to elaborate or share their knowledge with other people. Our app gives the ability to travel through space, move with your keyboard’s arrows pretending to be a rocket, and move towards the “star” that you would like to be informed about. We have different options as a way of information such as twinkling stars, the brightness and uniqueness of stars as well as more complicated terms such as cepheids, light curves and cataclysmic values. The feature that stands out of our app’s tools is the opportunity to test your knowledge on the information provided to you. We wanted the questions to be user-friendly, as the main purpose of our tool is to inform more and more people about the change of stars during time. We tried to make it child-friendly and at the same time, suitable for other ages too. Due to time limitations, our application could use some improvements and it has a lot of potential. Our future work would be the creation of a web-page where everyone could be informed through some educational videos and scientific articles. We would also suggest that this web page introduces online lectures from people from all over the world that could inform us about stellar variation . Adding information for both amateurs and professional lovers of this field. Also, a nice addition to our information tool, would be the bigger specification in terms of level of difficulty. For example, we could provide different sections of quizzes according to the age of the user. In addition, having the ability to present workshops or educational videos from professionals online, would be also a nice idea for future work. Last but not least, we would like to add a feature of star’s visualization, where someone could move through a bar, during different periods of time, and see how this could affect the stars. (More information here: https://skysdiamonds.my.canva.site/ )
Space Agency Data
There is no doubt that all the resources provided to us through the Space Apps Challenge were very helpful and inspiring for us. Having the opportunity to expand our knowledge according star variation was very inspirational topic for our team.
Nasa Space Apps Team https://2022.spaceappschallenge.org/challenges/2022-challenges/twinkle-twinkle-little-star/resources (accessed October 1, 2022).
The StarChild Team. “Cepheids” StarChild Nasa. https://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/questions/cepheids.html (accessed October 1, 2022). The Imagine Team. “Imagine the Universe!” Imagine Nasa. https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/objects/cataclysmic_variables.html (accessed October 1, 2022).
Nasa Space Apps Team
https://youtu.be/ib64cwOJxpo(accessed October 1, 2022)
https://archive.stsci.edu/missions-and-data/tess (accessed October 1, 2022)
https://archive.stsci.edu/missions-and-data/kepler (accessed October 1, 2022
Hackathon Journey
From the moment we decided to apply for this amazing experience, we knew our journey would be amazing! It was an unforgettable experience where we had the chance to work and be teammates with people we did not know from before. All of our team members did not know each other from before and this made our journey even better. We learned about the way our colleagues work on their universities. We came up with difficult problems and challenges but we never gave up, we tried until the end and that’s what matters... What we liked the most about this experience was that we learned so many things about the galaxy and the stars. We also were able to improve our time management skills and had the chance to collaborate with new professionals.
References
Nasa Space Apps Team https://2022.spaceappschallenge.org/challenges/2022-challenges/twinkle-twinkle-little-star/resources (accessed October 1, 2022).
The StarChild Team. “Cepheids” StarChild Nasa. https://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/questions/cepheids.html (accessed October 1, 2022). The Imagine Team. “Imagine the Universe!” Imagine Nasa. https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/objects/cataclysmic_variables.html (accessed October 1, 2022).
Nasa Space Apps Team
https://youtu.be/ib64cwOJxpo(accessed October 1, 2022)
https://archive.stsci.edu/missions-and-data/tess (accessed October 1, 2022)
https://archive.stsci.edu/missions-and-data/kepler (accessed October 1, 2022)
Tags
#software #stars #stellar_variation #information_tool #test_knowledge #quiz