Ayllu - Space Apps Challenge

Ayllu| Create a Mascot

Create a Mascot

The world is full of scientific information that can help us make informed decisions and take action. However, that information is not always accessible to young learners. Your challenge is to create a mascot that can help make learning about Earth and space science more fun and welcoming for younger audiences.

STARTYEAST | Building a space mascot

Summary

Leveitor mascot is a personification product of a yeast cell, which has been the study subject of NASA to measure the impact of space radiation on living organisms. The aim of this mascot is to show randomly the daily NASA news in a didactic manner in order to promote user interaction, who has to download the mascot to show small images on the computer in a spontaneous and concise way. The images come from NASA publications, and are linked to its official page, allowing the user to obtain verified information. The level of attention that user gives to the mascot, will manifest different moods of it and will increase or decrease the level of interaction with the user.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We developed an interactive mascot that allows to show the work done by NASA, this mascot showing its research in images which are linked to the original publication.

This mascot moves and changes it´s position along the computer screen in order to capture the user's attention.

This mascot work as a channel of easy access to the information provided by NASA.

We hope to make NASA news more visible to young people.

How We Developed This Project

The team's inspiration for creating a mascot is based on the need of providing youth with true information about NASA. This should be done in a didactic way since social networks compete for users' attention. Our focus seeks interaction with the information NASA provides in its resources. Such interaction was measured through the number of visits obtained using the mascot as the channel.

The tools we used were Adobe Illustrator and Filmora.

The problems we encountered were:

Finding a representative and international mascot
Characterizing the mascot
Limited time

Nonetheless, the project succeeded in:

Designing a mascot in a short period of time that allowed for NASA's visibility
Creating a good working atmosphere in the team

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We draw on NASA BioSentinel research as inspiration in creating our mascot. Yeasts are organisms that are being used to study the effect of space radiation on their genome, this information will allow know the effects to extrapolate to astronauts.

- Images and audios provided as NASA resources to demonstrate our solution.