ITC Tampico! - Computer Engineering - Space Apps Challenge

ITC Tampico! - Computer Engineering| Can You Hear Me Now?

Awards & Nominations

ITC Tampico! - Computer Engineering has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Nominee

Can You Hear Me Now?

Human missions to Mars are moving from the realm of science fiction to science fact. Your challenge is to design an interactive application to explore the challenge of communicating with astronauts on Mars from Earth.

Hello Mars! Interactive Videogame

Summary

This videogame has the purpose of getting the younger audience interested into interplanetary communication. It gives a broad overview of the subject explaining the operation of current tools in a simple way. It also incorporates fun dynamics to "repair" the artifacts and be able to send messages to Earth

How We Addressed This Challenge

Our proposal consists in a videogame where gamers can explore a Martian base with communication elements, including descriptions of each device. Also, the game contains a gamemode where you have to complete minigames in order to "repair" certain communications devices and send a message to Earth.

This project helps to capture the attention of a large young audience, engaging them in the subject and showing them the existing problems. In addition, it provides an entertaining user experience and allows players to have fun while learning.

During this hackathon, we developed a concept demo where we include a functional version of the exploration gamemode, as well as a minigame proposal for the repairing gamemode.

How We Developed This Project

We were inspired by popular current games like Among Us, in which the player is tasked with repairing a spaceship in order to survive. To carry out the demo of this project, we used two programming languages: Python and C#. In python we used pygame to create a minigame for the repair game mode, and to create the base game with the explore game mode demo we used the Unity engine, programmed with C#

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We used information provided by NASA so that the player knows the basic operation of each element that is included in the game mode "explore".

In this way we make sure to provide correct information, this way the player can learn about the subject in a fun and interactive way, generating interest.