The_Phenomenals| Create a Mascot
Awards & Nominations
The_Phenomenals has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Create a Mascot
La Phenomena
Summary
Our goal is to make learning about STEM a whole lot more fun and personal for first generation college-dreaming Latino students like us. Because our daily lives on earth are hard as we fight COVID-19 in the Latino community, our Mascot, a NASA Phoenix, inspires children to stay strong and overcome hardships through the power of transformation. Symbolically, the recent huge wildfires are the fires transforming our phoenix, La Phenomena. She is a super-heroine who learns from all of nature (in the form of Mexican alebrijes) to protect the Earth! We also wanted scientists to know they can take inspiration from indigenous cultures in protecting the earth from wildfires and climate catastrophe.
How We Addressed This Challenge
We designed a mascot named La Phenomena (a play on the words phoenix, climate and space phenomenon and us, The Phenomenals!) The mascot is inspired by Indigenous Mexican culture. We hope it inspires students to learn about our culture and see that the respect for earth that our culture has should inspire them to learn about science and protect the earth. We want all children to bring their cultures to NASA and solve the earth's common challenge-- climate change. We believe imagination is a powerful tool for exploring and coming up with bright ideas for the future. We hope our mascot draws the attention of younger learners. We had great fun doing thing Space Challenge and want to encourage other students from all backgrounds to join the fun!
How We Developed This Project
Our team wanted to show our creative side by using digital animation and video editing to create the NASA Mascot-- La Phenomena (an Indigenous Climate Change Super-Heroine). We used Clip Studio paint, FireAlpaca, Google slides and CCP for our project. We created a slideshow that tells a little bit about each of our members. We also explain more about our mascot and the process of how we created it. Our team struggled to finish the project in such a sort amount of time and stay up till 3am on Saturday night collaborating! We definitely achieved our goal and feel pretty confident about our work because we had great fun putting this together. We hope it inspires other students like us to dream big (whether about space, saving the Earth, or working at NASA) and remaining humble to learn from all of nature and all cultures.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
Maynard, N. G., Burgess, P., Oskal, P., Turi, A., Mathiesen, J. M., Gaup, I. G. E., ... & Gebelein, J. (2008). Eurasian Reindeer Pastoralism in a Changing Climate: Indigenous Knowledge and NASA Remote Sensing.
- We used this paper to see that indigenous cultures are teaching NASA and benefitting from NASA technology to fight climate change. It also shows that nature and animals have a lot to teach us about how to overcome the climate crisis. We are a team and in this flight of our lifetimes together!
NASA. (2020). Nasa Logo. NASA Space Apps Challenge. NASA. https://legacy.spaceappschallenge.org/.
- We used the NASA logo to inspire young students to work at NASA and save the planet as super-hero's and super-heroine's.
Project Demo
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1r__t5Bj0nT9hrvQKK7PGMB89h9bFh8oudN8dZli9jJ0/edit?usp=sharing
Data & Resources
Lake, F. K., & Christianson, A. C. (2019). Indigenous fire stewardship.
Leonard, K., Aldern, J. D., Christianson, A., Ranco, D., Thornbrugh, C., Loring, P. A., ... & Moola, F. (2020). Indigenous Conservation Practices Are Not a Monolith: Western cultural biases and a lack of engagement with Indigenous experts undermine studies of land stewardship.
Näkkäläjärvi, K. (2012). Climate Change and Traditional Knowledge. In Arctic Science, International Law and Climate Change (pp. 105-109). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Schang, K. A., Trant, A. J., Bohnert, S. A., Closs, A. M., Humchitt, M., McIntosh, K. P., ... & Wickham, S. B. (2020). Ecological research should consider Indigenous peoples and stewardship.
Wyatt, R., Kimura, K., Subbarao, M., & Squires, G. (2020). Planetariums as Loci for Indigenous Community Engagement. AAS, 203-07.