Space Horses

Uberlandia | Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star

Awards & Nominations

Space Horses has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Nominee

Space Horse

High-Level Project Summary

The solution to this challenge was to make an educational game called “SPACE HORSE” to teach people about stellar variability, how and why the stars in the night sky change, two incredible but complex topics.The idea is to make a 2D game starring an astronaut horse, which aims to explore space and stars, in order to know their mysteries and variables. Thus, the user will have fun and learn with the game.Our idea will change the way people meet the stars, in a relaxed, educational and thought-provoking way, in order to turn a complex topic into pure fun and learning. We hope inspire people to search for the Universe's Knowledge and contribuite for the Science and the whole community.

Link to Final Project

https://github.com/gabrielchayb/Space-Horse2D

Link to Project "Demo"

https://youtube.com/shorts/JKVDDr2ReVg?feature=share

Detailed Project Description

Our project is a 2D game who has the goal to bring variable star for everyone in a democratic and fun way. The player controls an astronaut horse - jumping and running for any side, thru variable star cenarios based on real data from NASA and partners.

In our Final Project, we design a binary Cefeida and provide all data from her pulsing period, shine variability, distance and more. Conform the player run and explore the cenario, the horse explain everything about the cenario. Here is a image and a video who demonstrate the jogability:

We hope to achieve many more people and contribuite to communnity by providing accessible knowledge, making the game bigger, with more open source Data, interaction, fun and collaboration. In the future, we wanna improve a reward's sistem, costumizable skins and many more cenarios and stars who have their bright variation in real time.

Link to the game demonstration of jogability: https://youtu.be/Gb5xf8EuDUI

Space Agency Data

We used the following articles provided by NASA as important theoretical frameworks in our research:

https://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/questions/cephei; https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/toolbox/timing1.html.

We consider that they were important starting points for our research, which was deepened with scientific articles from Brazilian universities. The articles served in our research to understand, respectively, the theory and historical understanding behind the Cepheid variation, so that later we could apply this knowledge in the game, in a didactic and simpler way, even for laymen; and the regular variation of brightness as a function of a certain time interval, which is what the stellar variation chosen to be worked on in our project consists of. The historical importance of the Cepheids for the study of Astronomy corroborated our choice. It was NOT the only data we used, but it was from the resources from NASA in the challenge page.

Hackathon Journey

It was very difficult and challenging, but we have an incredible experience! We got an amazing result because our team was very collaborative and united - we face the adversities with dialogue and we worked very well. We learn a lot of things - about cefeidas, NASA and space agencies, programming games, design, pedagogy and the most important of all: how we can change the world, bringing knowledge to everyone in a fun way, interactive and thoght provocating! We are inspired by our curiosity and hungry to know about the universe expansion, the "twinkle" of variable star, how light travel thru the space and how Edwin Hubble discovered 9 galaxies using Cefeidas - and how to reunite all of this, with NASA open source data and put in a game to disseminate this knowledge to everyone, in a democratic way. We strongly believe in science for changing the world, and mostly changing Brazil. We approach this project as an opportunity to make history and changing people's lives - inspiring everyone who wants to play to search for Astronomics and Sciense. We wanna thank NASA for this incredible opportunity and we hope help as many people as we can!

References

● https://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/questions/ce pheids.html (NASA available resource that provided Cepheid’s information and its historical importance).

● https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/toolbox/timing1.html (NASA available resource used to understand the regular brightness variation through light curves).

● https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/394076/mod_reso urce/content/1/Cefeidas.pdf (USP - provided specific information about Cepheids and its pulsation cicle)

● http://www.if.ufrgs.br/fis02001/aulas/estvar.htm (UFRGS - obtainment of data related to variable stars).

● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQbL89KHvCI (general star variation’s information).

● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpjNg_KUtZ8%20 (USP/UNIVESP - University of São Paulo’s class ministered by João Evangelista Steiner about variable stars. Provided us information about Cefeida’s historical importance and behavior during it’s pulsation cycle).

● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=At_IbD4zXow&list=LL& index=3 (UFRB - Star variability through Hertzprung-Russel diagram research).

● https://sci.esa.int/web/hubble/-/variable-stars-in-hubble-s-s ky (used as wallpaper: variable stars captured by Hubble telescope).

● https://www.inovacaotecnologica.com.br/noticias/noticia.p hp?artigo=estrelas-variaveis-pulsantes-cefeidas&id=0101 30101129#.YzdkLXbMK3A (obtainance of data and use of Binary Cepheid image).