Space Age Contact| Better Together
Better Together
Space Age contact
Summary
The "Space Age Contact" project is to create a place where people from all over the world come to solve problems in domains such as astronomy, spacecraft, or physics. Who want to learn about space but also know important NASA contributors from different parts of the world who helped achieve today’s space technology.
How We Addressed This Challenge
We have developed a wrapper API to serve web and mobile platforms, prototypes for client web and multiplatform mobile client and content for topic games, i.e. practice questions, answers and theory about different topics such as planets, comets, stars, physics…
This is an app whose purpose is dedicated to all audiences who want to learn about space but also know important NASA contributors from different parts of the world who helped achieve today’s space technology. The game consists of many problems, where each one has one of 3 possible level categories: Basic, Intermediate and Difficult. Once the player selects an option, he will be able to create a team with different international members who will eventually sign up to the app. Consequently the user can choose between different topics such as astronomy and physics, and can discuss with their team a correct answer. The team that gathers more points is the one who stays up in the rank. This will increase the passion for science and astronomy to people who aren't aware of these topics and to comprehend a pinch of curiosity to those who want to start studying or learning something from the science branch. Also, how does this contribute to breaking this racism gap? Well, each and everyone of us has a dream, some others might dream about becoming an astronaut, an important physicist, an excellent mathematician, or an awesome engineer. But we can’t achieve that on our own. It is better to communicate as a team, and therefore to share knowledge and succeed as a whole society. We, team Space age contact, want a world in which ideas aren’t limited and that people's curiosity and contributions are heard. This is why this app stays us connected, stays us in contact. This is a Space Age generation.
How We Developed This Project
We believe that our generation is willing to become every single day a more technology efficient population, but we as a whole world full of expectations and dreams, overall everybody wants to create a compromising future. We are nowadays so attached to our cell phones, computers, searching for data, analyzing softwares, thinking how we can improve our society and to idealize our dream jobs to make it effortless. But how about humane interaction? In fact, technology sells the idea of keeping us everyday closer, and that’s right. But what happens when you are into your own world and you forget what you actually have around? Science is in every corner of the whole world. Our inspiration for our team name was the name of one famous and always remembered passenger from the challenger mission. Her name is Christa McAuliffe, a teacher from Concord High School in New hampshire. She was selected as the primary candidate for the NASA Teacher inSpace Project on July 19, 1985. She was born on September 2, 1948 in Boston Massachusetts.
She was willing to go to space and share with his students and the world the beauty of science. She actually wrote in her NASA application form: “I watched the Space Age being born, and I would like to participate.” So are we. Our world is proceeding to develop new technology capable of making space available for everyone, even for an “ordinary person” as Christa. We need “an infectious enthusiasm” just as Mark Travis expressed his opinion about the teacher. We are responsible for shaping our generations, but for molding a great society we first need to form passionate people capable of communicating and transforming grupal ideas into reality. Space Age contact is the best path to start.
About software that we have used:
- API Rest: Django, a Python framework; Heroku for web hosting.
- Mobile app client: Ionic, AngularJS and Apache Cordova, with TypeScript, Sass and HTML5.
- Web client: Angular 9 with TypeScript, Sass and HTML5.
- Development: Git for version control and GitHub; Atom and Visual Studio Code.
- Content: Google Documents.
- Communication: Google Meet and Slack.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
We used space agency data to compliment the most part of our research info, topics like astronomy, astrophysics and physics, also, besides the information that is given in most schools of the world, space agencies data provides us with interesting facts about our solar system, our planet and deep space objects in general.
We, as a team, and as habitants of this planet, this solar system, and this universe, would like to thank NASA, ESA and all space agencies to be transparent and share with us tons and tons of useful information that we wouldn’t be able to gather by ourselves, this information was and will be useful for us in our project since we are focused on teaching and encouraging people to space topics, and, nothing is better than doing so with actual space agencies data.
- https://www.space.com/nasa-stops-racist-nicknames-cosmic-objects.html
- https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/infographic.view.php?id=11268
- https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/how-do-stars-form-and-evolve
- https://www.nasa.gov/johnson/HWHAP/the-overview-effect
- https://www.nasa.gov/stemonstrations-energy.html
- https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/stemonstrations_kinetic-potential-energy.pdf
- https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/airplane/volume.html
- https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/591747main_MVW_Intro.pdf
- https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/airplane/fluden.html
- https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/what-is-gravity/en/
- https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/observatories/learning/swift/classroom/docs/law_grav_guide.pdf
Project Demo
Data & Resources
- https://www.space.com/nasa-stops-racist-nicknames-cosmic-objects.html
- https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/infographic.view.php?id=11268
- https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/how-do-stars-form-and-evolve
- https://www.nasa.gov/johnson/HWHAP/the-overview-effect
- https://www.nasa.gov/stemonstrations-energy.html
- https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/stemonstrations_kinetic-potential-energy.pdf
- https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/airplane/volume.html
- https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/591747main_MVW_Intro.pdf
- https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/airplane/fluden.html
- https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/what-is-gravity/en/
- https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/observatories/learning/swift/classroom/docs/law_grav_guide.pdf