High-Level Project Summary
We made a game app for 6 to 10-year-old kids that allows them to change different aspects of a star to create their own one. While they play they get information about what each change means to the star and at the end, they get a final representation of their star.People don't realize that stars actually change. Even if we see the same star on Earth, that star has suffered a series of changes throughout days, months, or years in brightness, components, or size. So we wanted to teach kids that stars change even if we don't notice those changes on Earth.Space can seem a very abstract topic, we see some stars but there are even more stars that we aren't aware of or can't see.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
What does it do?
It is a web app that allows users to change different aspects of stars (brightness, color, and size). While they change it, they have a description of what each change means at the same moment they see a visual representation of a star.
How does it work?
We wanted to make a very easy and intuitive app. The user finds on the homepage a brief description of the app and a button to start the game.
The first step tells you to modify the star brightness and it explains what star brightness means, how it is measured and why some stars are brighter than others. We simplified the data and put values from 1 to 10, 1 meaning that the star is very dim and 10 very bright.
The second step is changing its colors, the user will be able to select a point and they will see the color of the star.
What benefits does it have?
The main benefit is to bring space knowledge closer to kids in an easy way and fun and games can be a great opportunity to learn new things and have fun.
Kids now will understand that the stars in the night sky are very different and why.
What do you hope to achieve?
We hope that this project can be useful as a learning tool in schools to provide complex knowledge in a simple way and make teachers' job easier.
Tools, coding languages...
- Angular (JavaScript) to build the interface.
- Docker: we placed the web app in a docker image to later download and run the image on any computer to provide the website.
- Python (Jupyter notebook) to download the data from the BRITE source.
- Github actions: whenever we needed to change code and also was used to generate the "docker image".
More info
Github Organization URL: https://github.com/nasastarseekers
App: https://twinklenasa.netlify.app/
Space Agency Data
For this project, we analyzed the data from different recommended sources:
- BRITE dataset: it was very useful to be able to see the variations in the brightness of stars represented in wavelengths. We used this dataset for a while and we wanted to use it for an API for the final project but it became an inspiration for the outcome.
- Light curves: We took it as an initial resource to read light curves and what they meant.
Hackathon Journey
It has been exciting but also overwhelming because of the complexity of the data we found. It wasn't easy to interpret the datasets with our little physics and chemistry knowledge. But we are happy that we found a solution to the problem.
We chose this challenge because stars are a fascinating topic to research, we love looking at them but we rarely understand them.
We tried different approaches to this solution: we knew for sure that this was going to be a game. However, the dynamics of the game changed as the challenge passed. It was going to be also a game to make your own star but using actual data from NASA, this data would be from a dataset and the player would get at the end a real star.
But we learned to look through different types of data and also the technology used for the app, as well as information about stars that we didn't know before!
We would like to thank the local team organization for being always so helpful whenever we had any problem or doubts with our project.
References
- Image of the star: https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1146186241004545975
- Cursor design: https://www.cursors-4u.com/
- Information about star variability: https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/cesar/the-hertzsprung-russell-diagram
- Color of the stars: https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/cesar/the-hertzsprung-russell-diagram
Tags
game, app, kids, teaching tool, stars, variable stars, changing stars, stellar variability