Space Invaders| Create a Mascot
Create a Mascot
Plasmo's Space Quest
Summary
Hi! We are the “space invaders” team and we’ve chosen the create a Mascot challenge.We have developed our Mascot, named Plasmo.Plasmo is a curious inhabitant of IO. He is friendly, affective and funny, and he loves to share and play. He knows all the planets, moons and asteroids of our solar system, and beyond. He travels through space thanks to his plasmatic polymorphic suit that protects him from the inclemencies of space weatherWe decided to develop an app as a channel to introduce Plasmo to the world.The main goal of Plasmo is to make learning funny and easy, so for that we purposed a game!
How We Addressed This Challenge
Our goal is to bring children closer to science through games, encouraging learning and creativity development, in the company of our friendly mascot.
In this case, the game we propose is the following:
Plasmo will show to children a planet in the solar system, detailing its most relevant characteristics.
The childs then will have to imagine and draw a creature that they think is best suited for the characteristics of that planet.
At the end of the round, every child will describe their creature, explaining how it can adapt to the planet characteristics and environment.
Then, one by one, they will decide which of their teammates' drawings they liked the most, and the voted player will win a point.
At the end of certain number of rounds, the player with most points wins the game
This simple, but powerful idea, will motivate the children to learn more about the planets while exploiting their creativity.
At the same time, it allows them to connect with other children, share, communicate, have fun and appreciate the effort of their peers.
We’ve chosen to develop a simple app to bring Plasmo to life and provide the basic framework of the game.
This idea is easily exportable to other platforms, such as printed cards for example. And it is not even required that the children be in the same space, being able to share their drawings through any virtual platform
The app currently has a language selection, a main screen with a start button, and a “swipe to the right” to see the rules.
On start button pressed, a random planet will be displayed, with some basic information, and with swipe to the right, a more detailed information will be shown.
A live demo of the app running on an android device can be seen in the following video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W8XS1nq6_ya0fKsbKKFDvNFITWivKmMD/view?usp=sharing
The round time (if desired), number of rounds and player score is left to be defined and controlled by the organizer of the game, but we have plans for such features in future releases.
This game is suitable for almost any age range, even adults could learn and have fun!
And we think this project could be easily adapted to schools and kindergarten.
We think Plasmo could be present in many other games or formats (actually, our first idea was completely different from this one).
And as long as it's fun, Plasmo will be there to be part of it
How We Developed This Project
The challenge was chosen by the youngest member of the team (He has 9) . He is very curious about space and science in general. So creating a mascot that help childs about space was really interesting.
We decided to bring this mascot alive through an app to introduce both our mascot, and information about planets in our solar system.
To fulfill this challenge, we decided to create an app as simple as possible, introducing some gamification techniques to motivate childs to learn more about planets.
We developed the app with Flutter, a framework for Dart. It was very challenging, because none of the two developers had previous experience with this framework, and little to none experience with app development. But we chose Flutter because of fast development features, and its multiple platform support. We manage to learn the basis and develop the app from scratch in only two days!
Meanwhile, the illustrator and the designer, along with the youngest member of the team, worked on the mascot concept and design, and all the functional design of the app and screens.
They used tools like Illustrator, Photoshop, and all of their talent!
We were very happy when we saw Plasmo for the first time. And we think we really achieved what we set out to do with our mascot.
Another achievement was that we were able to deliver a functional app with a complete gameflow, that also has support for English and Spanish languages, to make the information even more accesible.
To accomplish the challenge, we had to make some changes from what we planned in the beginning, but the essence of the idea was not altered.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
We used mainly the information from https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/overview/, we narrowed the solution to this specific topic, with the objetive to create the Mascot, with its own identity, and make it able to help in the learning of the planets. If Plasmo is successful, he (or she?) will be helping in many other topics.
We basically gathered all the 10 need to know things about Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, along with its images and brief detail to use as direct input thought the game.
It is relatively easy to expand the game to introduce dwarf planets, moons and asteroids. So future versions of the app could be more challenging
Project Code
Data & Resources
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/overview/
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/mercury/overview/
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/venus/overview/
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/mars/overview/
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/jupiter/overview/
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/saturn/overview/
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/uranus/overview/
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/neptune/overview/
https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/all-about-mercury/en/
https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/all-about-venus/en/
https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/all-about-mars/en/
https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/all-about-jupiter/en/
https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/all-about-saturn/en/
https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/all-about-uranus/en/
https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/all-about-neptune/en/
Images:
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/system/feature_items/images/19_mars.png
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/system/feature_items/images/16_jupiter_new.png
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/system/feature_items/images/18_mercury_new.png
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/system/feature_items/images/27_venus_jg.png
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/system/feature_items/images/28_saturn.png
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/system/feature_items/images/29_uranus.png
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/system/feature_items/images/30_neptune.png