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.

LaikApp

Summary

Woof, Hi!I am Laika, a mixed-breed dog born in Moscow-Russia in 1957, I was a street until the Soviet space agency adopted me to be part of a great mission. I went through hard training with two canine companions, Albina and Mushka, but I was the one chosen to man the Sputnik 2 spacecraft, on November 3, 1957 and thus become the first terrestrial living being to orbit the planet earth. This mission gave way to taking man and woman into space and now I am here to guide you through the universe of knowledge. We created this project in order to help motivate learning and knowledge about our universe, in an interactive way and focused mainly on children.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We develop an interactive application for children's use, in order to encourage and satisfy the curiosity of the infinite questions of children and young people.

It is of vital importance to promote the educational use of mobile devices, as well as information and communication technologies, being a window for the learning of the little ones, through the most appropriate applications, such as the one being developed in our team.

LaikApp answers your questions by using a database that provides solutions to different types of questions of greater or lesser complexity, using a previously trained machine.

LaikApp is expected to be a tool for the educational environment, mainly presented to the learning area and serve as a motivation for children and young people to expand their knowledge. Finally, specify actions to achieve its implementation in a teaching environment such as the Francisco José de Caldas Observatory located in the town of Cajete, near Popayán.

How We Developed This Project

Starting from the observation of the inappropriate use of mobile devices by children and young people from an early age, the idea of ​​implementing an interactive educational tool aimed at this younger audience was born, developed using the Unity software, programming in C# language , and the use of the assistant tool and database of IBM Watson, with which it was possible to develop an application to answer many of the questions that children and young people could usually ask about our universe. The main difficulty at the time of application development was the limited knowledge in some characteristics of the tools used, which partially delayed its development.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

Some data and information from the different space agencies will be used for the creation of the database of questions and answers to train LaikApp.

In addition to this, the sound libraries provided by NASA were used to give the user a massive environment in space.

Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Judging process.