Artemis Trailers| Putting the 'Art' in Artemis
Awards & Nominations
Artemis Trailers has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Putting the 'Art' in Artemis
The Artemis Trail
Summary
The Artemis Trail is a choose-your-own-adventure game to inspire middle school students to participate in the future of space exploration. Playing as any of four types of roles, such as an Artist, Technologist, Manager, and Astronaut, players will make key decisions (involving logic and problem solving) in their character’s journeys through the Artemis mission and its end goal of exploring the frontiers of Mars, while learning more about the history, science, and technology of space travel.
How We Addressed This Challenge
During the hackathon, our team envisioned a choose-your-own adventure game to help inform and inspire future generations to be involved in space exploration. Inspired by the enthusiasm and involvement the original televised moon landing sparked in the 1960s, we hope to create a creative, engaging experience that can encourage a similar spirit around our next moon landing in 2024.
We believe that an interactive game centering around role-playing and storytelling could not only raise interest in space travel for younger generations, but also help youth imagine their own futures in space exploration.
While our ultimate vision is to create a narrative that starts from the present and goes all the way through to humanity’s settlement on Mars, we started by prototyping the first level of the game: a playful, Buzzfeed-style quiz that lets players choose one of four roles: Artist, Technologist, Manager, and Astronaut. Further on, we plan on introducing logic based and critical thinking problems involving NASA information surrounding the Artemis Mission. We hope this game can provide an inclusive way to tell youth that all identities belong in the future of space. Space is not just for logical or analytical people - it’s also for those who are creative, great communicators, storytellers and more.
How We Developed This Project
Our group chose this challenge because we were interested in how history-making the Artemis Mission was, and we saw exciting opportunities for story-telling within it.
Our team consists of several mentors and students. Since most students did not have any coding experience and we had a limited time to learn it in this hackathon, we focused on project brainstorming and creating a simple, visual prototype using Google Slides.
The task of creating a whole choose-your-own-adventure game, imagining from the start-to-end of the Artemis program, was very daunting. In our group, initially planned to create an interactive narrative where players make choices - such as selecting what type of astronaut training they’ll do and what supplies they’ll purchase - that impact the success of the Artemis mission’s goal of delivering key data for humanity’s future to Mars. In our limited time, we decided to scale back and focus on the first level: choosing a character through a “Mission Diagnostic Test”, by answering personality-quiz style questions.
In the future, we would like to code the larger choose-your-own-adventure game in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, in a collaborative platform like Glitch.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
Currently, we have used NASA resources in the design of our game prototypes. We have taken photos from the NASA Images Gallery to set as the background for our game. We’ve also found ways to incorporate current news and research from NASA into our narrative; when revealing what role the player will be, we include links to explore what it means to really work in that role, today. For example, when we reveal the “Artist” character, we mention what role the artist will play in the game, while including links to articles that discuss the role of current artists at NASA.
In the future, we would like to incorporate real facts and information from the actual Artemis mission into the next levels of our game, referencing NASA’s official plan documents for the program. Our hope is to inspire youth while educating them about what space exploration involves, and we plan to incorporate real-world information as we build out different paths and choices in our adventure.
Project Demo
Data & Resources
Resources we used for learning about Artemis program:
https://www.nasa.gov/specials/artemis/
Images we used in the design:
https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/index.html
Resources we used for learning about artists at NASA:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-and-art-a-collaboration-colored-with-history
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/thestudio/
Oregon Trail Image Reference:
https://archive.org/details/msdos_Oregon_Trail_Deluxe_The_1992
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/the-oregon-trail
Personality Quiz Images:
Taken from Google Images (All characters we reference belong to their respective organizations. If this project moves forward we are happy to substitute in our own illustrations.