Charon| Create a Mascot
Create a Mascot
Keppy-B
Summary
This project is an attempt to inspire children, spread and facilitate access to scientific knowledge through the mascot, Keppy-B, inspired by the smallest planet discovered by NASA, bringing the idea that all little beings are part of the universe. By promoting interaction through an app, children will be able to choose their avatars to represent them, individualizing the experience. This introduces various scientific topics, stories, art in science, values and other important concepts for the formation of an individual. Our goal is making people believe in their potential to transform the world through science.
How We Addressed This Challenge
The mascot we developed, Keppy-B, is a robot, commonly associated with technology and human development, thus being an easy and direct representation of the importance of science in our lives.
In order for him to be inspiring to children, we made a video demonstration of an interactive app in which Keppy-B guides the user through the learning of astronomy related contents, while also presenting personalized animations based on the choices made during the creation of the child´s avatar. In this way, the mascot is capable not only of communicating knowledge efficiently but also of enabling the children to actually see themselves in the world of science.
Our mascot is inspiring and didactic, which communicates and brings the information in a way to empower the children. Our differential is that we give the feeling of belonging and inclusion, which is even in our motto that guides the entire project “Connect your universe with ours”, that is, the particularities and individualities make up a plural and significant whole for the entire universe.
Here is our video demonstration of the app with Keppy-B:
How We Developed This Project
Our team was inspired to choose this challenge by our will to make the scientific world a more inclusive place, especially for children. We saw this challenge as an opportunity to introduce science to people’s routine in an interactive, easy, fun and inclusive way.
To develop the mascot itself, we used digital drawing tools, in order to create drawings that are visually compatible with an app interface but also maintaining aspects of hand drawing. The animations were made with the drawings in design softwares, such as Adobe Photoshop. The soundtrack was made with recordings on a DAW software (Digital Audio Workstation) and the videos were edited with Adobe Premiere.
A problem we thought about while creating Keppy-B was finding something that distinguished the mascot , besides just communicating scientific knowledge to children. We realized that it isn’t enough to just teach new information or make it more accessible, but it is also important that the children felt that they could actually be a part of that new world they would be discovering.
That’s why we developed a personalized animation that would be different for each user based on the item they choose while creating their avatar.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
Regarding the use of information from NASA’s databases, our mascot’s name (Keppy-B) was based on the exoplanet Kepler-37b, discovered by NASA’s Kepler mission.
We also used the database as the source for the content of our app demonstration, like the history of women in NASA, for example.
Besides that, we used an audio track of a data sonification of Jupiter’s radio emissions (captured by the Galileo spacecraft) in the composition of the original soundtrack for the app.
Project Demo
Project Code
Data & Resources
Kepler missions and the discovery of Kepler-37b:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/overview/index.html
History of the first women of NASA:
https://www.nasa.gov/content/katherine-johnson-biography
https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/home/F_Astronaut_Mae_Jemison.html
Jupiter "sounds":
https://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/features/halloween_sounds.html