Earth Reformers - Space Apps Challenge

Earth Reformers| 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.

Mending Earth

Summary

Disasters such as flood, erosion, wildfires etc. have destroyed lives, properties, rendered people homeless mostly due to increasing greenhouse gases, increase in atmospheric temperature etc. Despite all these consequences, quite a large number of individuals are still not informed of what climate change is and how their actions and activities affect the earth. Hence the game, mending earth aims to inform people about climate change, what causes climate change, negative impacts of climate change and our role in combating climate change. The objective of the game is to encourage its players to engage in activities that can reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as much as possible.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We developed the game, mending earth which provides an opportunity to learn about the earth with peers, which have been discovered to be one of the most effective methods of acquiring knowledge. We aspire to use our mascot game to create awareness about the earth especially the impact of climate change and to inspire people to action to combat climate change.

How We Developed This Project

Our first step was to decide on the central information to be communicated (climate change) and then analyze the associated data from the NASA website using Tableau software. We decided on communicating the impact of greenhouse gasses on the environment, particularly carbon dioxide, and how this is connected to our daily activities.

Afterwards, we decided to model the idea in form of a board game that can be played by a group of individuals. The board game has four regions — forest, Greenland, desert and ocean — to represent our location-specific daily interactions. The track on the board was made in a spherical shape to mimic the landscape of the earth. Further, the game was designed using three design software: Adobe Illustrator, Blender and Moment of Inspiration (MOI).

The mascots that represent each player and signifies eco-friendly usable materials were hand created using aluminum foil, carton, scissors and gum.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

Data was collected on CO2 emissions and rising temperatures over the years and it was deduced that there has been an annual increase in CO2 emission into the atmosphere leading to the increment of wildfire cases, erosion, melting ice Polycarp, flooding, droughts etc. From the plotted graph we were able to obtain the relationship between increasing co2 levels and rising temperatures with the number of occurring disasters.