CarbonKillers| What Is Our Carbon Footprint?
What Is Our Carbon Footprint?
CarbonKillers
Summary
CarbonKillers shows interactively data of the carbon footprint. It consists in a game that introduces you in a scenario where you'll have to take decisions, and according to those decisions, you get a result represented by real data from different sources about the carbon footprint, showing how the choices we take can impact the whole planet, and the main sources and some solutions that anyone can do are presented. It's a new way of showing the information to people, creating awareness of this problem by entertainment.
How We Addressed This Challenge
The goal of the challenge is to inform about the carbon footprint, so we decided to delevop it from another perspective, not just showing information to the user, but making the user playing and learning from it.
It brings an immersive experiencie based on a story we developed, where you have to act as Psyphus, who becomes a governing, answering questions about what's best for you and your people. This helps to make the user be aware of things they choose normally or that other people have to choose. The user can experience in a fun and interactive way the consequences of decisions. The game itself is about concepts that are directly related to the carbon footprint, and when you end the game you get a result depending on your choices, which is compared to real data. So this represents a simulation on how the things we do everyday got us to the point we are now respect the global carbon footprint.
We show local and global data about the carbon footprint after the game, and a glossary with a lot of concepts, so everything can be understood by anyone. For this thing we use a friendly language and avoided complicated definitions, so anyone that uses CarbonKillers can understand the terms and interpret the data.
How We Developed This Project
We approached the project by thinking in a way of showing serious information by a fun method, so we came up with the idea of creating a game of decisions, which we think is the best for this, for the reason that decisions are important to define the world is gonna develop.
For making this idea come true, we created a structure we followed.
- At first, we needed all te possible information to have well knowledge of the situation, so we gathered a lot of information from national and international sources, to get us informed about everything we needed to know.
- Then we thought in a way of making fun learning, so we came up with a game.
- The game could be in differents ways, but we decided to make it a decision based game, so we started creating the story behind it, and the choices and possible answers to it, based on all the data we gathered before.
- Then we implemented a MATLAB code for the data analysis of OCO-2, a mission form NASA that scans the atmosphere for CO2, and were processed 40 registers obtained from NASA files. Then a global color map for visualizing the data was made using the coordinates and CO2 given in the registers, and also a graphic that shows the mean of the data to see the change of Carbon footprint through the years.
- We also implemented a glossary to define some terms, based on our previous knowledge.
- After this, we uploaded all te information to a localhost using Python (especially using Django as framework), JavaScript and HTML
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
We used data from the OCO-2 NASA mission to create a global map that shows the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere through the years, and a global mean to visualize how that mean value has changed through the years. This brings a really good visualization of the situation we're refering to and let us have extra information about the carbon footprint trend, so we can look for conclusions and find solutions.