Intergalactic Cowgirls| Space Exploration in Your Backyard
Space Exploration in Your Backyard
Take Off: Washington
Summary
“Take Off” is an interactive map of WA that allows users to learn more about local places that contribute to the work of space exploration and education. When a user clicks on a specific location, it provides a website where the user can get more information. We categorized the locations into the categories of "business", "academic", and "recreational", color-coding them accordingly. Underneath the map is information about why this resource is important and how space technology helps our communities, as well as information about local events, recent news, and a highlight of women from WA. Our target audience is students who come from underrepresented groups, which is women and BIPOC.
How We Addressed This Challenge
Our project provides a culmination of many different resources about space exploration, and also provides a some educational resources. While our project tackled Washington State specifically, the general interface should be transferrable to other states by providing new coordinates and a local dataset. This project is important because it provides an easy resource both for underrepresented students who may not be sure where to start when getting interested in studying engineering or science, specifically space related, but could also be helpful for more experienced people who want to find new experiences near them. Our project is an interactive map of Washington that allows users to learn more about local businesses, colleges, or planetariums/observatories that contribute to space exploration and education. Users can click on a specific location, which provides them with the name as well as a link to a website with more information. To make this information more robust, in the future each location could have a short description. We also wanted to allow users to filter the locations by different categories of "business," "academic," and "recreational" by providing checkboxes and color-coding. Underneath the map is different tabs for information. The "about" tab includes information about the importance of the resource, and there is also tabs to highlight local events, recent local news, and highlights some women from WA who have made significant contributions to space exploration. We intended this section to also be able to be updated with future events and news. It could also hold more tabs in the future, if any local clubs wanted to advertise their events, or to include more historical or educational information.
How We Developed This Project
Our team was inspired to choose this challenge because we wanted to learn more about space exploration in our own area. When approaching the project, we started with the broad idea that we could create a map that showcases different businesses or universities. During development, we began to think of ideas that would make the map more useful, such as adding recreational places, categorizing the different locations, and including links and descriptions under the map with more information. Also during development, we tried to think of our target audience and how to cater to them. We decided to focus on compiling resources for underrepresented students who might not know where to look if they’re interested in getting into STEM. To create the project, we used R, specifically the Shiny package, and RStudio to code the project. We used Google Sheets to create the dataset, Kapwing to create our icons, and created a GitHub repository to store all of this information. One big achievement was being able to develop a decent prototype for our vision, because only one of our team members knows the R programming language, and none of us have ever used Shiny to make an app before. Some of our problems included some struggles with the coding based on inexperience, but we were able to overcome the majority of these challenges. We would've liked to be able to use live data from NASAs website, but decided against it to be able to focus on creating a prototype and developing our concept more thoroughly. Another problem we encountered is a lack of BIPOC Washingtonians involved in space exploration that were readily featured, so we ended up only including a section dedicated to women.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
We used NASA data about local events to create an events tab, as well as data on their workforce. We also used other articles and educational materials, which were used to inform the user with further information about the importance of the project, including the importance of space technology and representation.
Project Demo
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ucyVw7trxUPnYJuqghdiKbvsGteUKt3yRiPclKfNk7I/edit#slide=id.p
Data & Resources
The links to the websites for each of the locations we used in the map are in the wa_locations dataset in our GitHub repository. The NASA data we used includes:
We also used other NASA resources and articles including:
- https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2020/noaanasas-suomi-npp-satellite-focuses-on-washington-states-ring-of-fire/
- https://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/researchernews/rn_WomensPanel.html#:~:text=%22There%20are%20more%20than%206%2C000,a%20workforce%20of%20about%2018%2C000.%22
- https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/15_ways_iss_benefits_earth
- https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/benefits/index.html
- https://www.nasa.gov/specials/60counting/tech.html
- https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/sightings/view.cfm?country=United_States®ion=Washington&city=Seattle#.X3pkwGhKg2w