G.A.I.A - Space Apps Challenge

G.A.I.A| 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.

Mother Nature (GAIA)

Summary

Our goal is to inform younger generations about some of the overlooked environmental problems and help them take action. Therefore, we have created 'Mother Nature' and started a website that Mother Nature can interact with young people. Mother Nature posts letters to convey her emotions and thoughts. The website also contains summarized scientific information for people who want to learn more about the planet Earth and our Mother Nature.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We have created a mascot named 'Mother Nature.' In order to reach to the younger generations, Mother Nature writes letters and shares summarized scientific information, via her personal website.

We think that our project might play a huge role in raising awareness about environmental issues that all living creatures and our planet face. Our humanized mascot choice was made due to the reason that empathy for each other is what we base our societies on, and we believe that referring to this might help people to see the current problems of our planet from a different and sincere point of view. Because of this, we chose to present an inanimate thing, the planet Earth, as being hurt and damaged, through our mascot.

How does it work?

Mother Nature's website is divided into five parts.

Home: Mother Nature welcomes you here.

Info & Story: You can read letters from Mother Nature and there is also informative posts. We plan to make this section automatized by artificial intelligence in the future. We have already automatized summarization, however, since our website is quite new, we didn't have the oppurtunity to implement our code and check up on various AI and deep learning systems afterwards.

About: Mother Nature introduces herself here, for the new readers and followers of her blog. Also, if you would like to learn about the team behind this project, you can find an introduction of our team as well.

Ideas: We are social creatures, and we might generate the best ideas while working together. This section is aimed towards encouraging people to share their ideas, discuss them, and take action eventually.

Organizations:It is a fact that there is a significant number of people who want to help change the direction of climate change, air pollution, water pollution and so more. Sometimes, it might be hard to decide what to do, and this section aims to demonstrate some of the actions they can take by visiting the websites provided on the page.

What do we hope to achieve?

Translate our website to some of the most spoken languages in order to reach out to more young people around the world.
Present a new platform to young people to share and exchange ideas.
Promote emphatizing with the planet Earth easily and form a view of the current situation of our planet.
Develop a mobile app for our website, so that Mother Nature can send notifications to her subscribers and stay in touch with them.
Sustain the website via using deep learning systems to automatize blog posts.

How We Developed This Project

Mascot

We asked our family members and friends to tell us what kind of mascot they would like to see. We told them that the goal of the mascot would be to teach them something they didn't know. Afterwards, we decided that we needed to address a problem first. Consequently, we realized an important problem: Incognizance about many environmental issues. Then, we shaped our mascot as the planet Earth to explain its own issues. We humanized our mascot in order to increase empathy and make the problems more understandable. In conclusion, we created a drained but wise mascot: 'Mother Nature.'

Website

We decided to create a website for the Mother Nature that she can express her emotions and thoughts to people around the world. We used Wix Editor in this manner. On our homepage, there is a picture of our mascot we have drawn. The picture contains green, blue, brown and red colors to represent the Earth. Across the other pages, we have included letters from the Mother Nature to convey social messages, informational posts, discussions, links to volunteer or donate to organizations. We wanted to make taking action easier by making learning and understanding about our planet easier with our website.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

Posting

We chose two articles and used those information to demonstrate the planned outline of the website.

Summarization

We tried out an artificial intelligence system from a library called Algorithmia. Owing to this, we have summarized articles from NASA and ESA to use them as descriptions of our posts.