Alpha Ursae Minoris - Space Apps Challenge

Alpha Ursae Minoris| Mission to Planet Earth: A Digital History

Mission to Planet Earth: A Digital History

NASA’s activities in space have brought new knowledge of the Earth, inspiring new ways of thinking about humanity and the planet. However, many people aren’t aware that NASA studies the Earth in addition to other planets. Your challenge is to tell stories of NASA’s Earth science enterprise using interactive digital tools. This will test your technical skills and your ability to think like a historian or educator.

ALPHA UMi

Summary

ALPHA UMi aims to connect the past with the present. There is no such time as the present; it is the time for action and for all endeavors. Still, the present stands on the shoulders of the past and draws from its learnings. ALPHA UMi is an interactive game that enables the users to relive past NASA missions, at the top of which is the Apollo 11 mission. Through dialogues and tasks, the user converses with the key figures that contributed to the mission, assists them in NASA offices, and learns along the way what it takes to send humanity on the moon. At the forefront of the objectives of the game is to demystify NASA operations, as well as to foster a deep interest in space exploration.

How We Addressed This Challenge

What did we develop?

An app-based gamified platform that enables the users to take a leap into the past and take part in past NASA missions as members of the crew in the mission control rooms. Through dialogues and tasks to accomplish depending on the function they choose, the users can interact with key figures, learn about facts and operations by doing, troubleshoot issues that arise, and experience missions from a lesser-known perspective.

Why is it important?

We believe that exploration is the destiny of human beings. In that sense, space exploration is also a necessary endeavor for human beings to get more clarity on the questions they have. In accordance to how astronauts testify of a feeling of shift in cognitive awareness when seeing Earth from afar (Frank White coined the term Overview Effect to describe this phenomenon), our aim is less ambitious. Our bargain can be considered a success as long as we promote interest in space such that, however slow the shift is, the users can start to understand our place in the universe and develop enlightened perspectives in their everyday life. That way they can feel empowered to act and come up with solutions to better the present times.

By developing our projects, we hope to achieve the following objectives:

To honor the people who have made space missions a reality, emphasizing the figures which are not usually in the spotlight (i.e. the mission control crew).
To promote space exploration and interest in space-related matters by demystifying the operations of NASA missions.
To promote knowledge by including educational material in the games (e.g. introducing new concepts to the users, testing knowledge through user-competitive quizzes).
To inform about new developments within NASA through a news feed and an announcement page.
To enable people to access an original space-related interactive environment from the comfort of their home, as it is a relevant topic today with the Covid-19.

How We Developed This Project

The idea of helping people reconnect with the past and offering them to possibility to develop new perspective stemmed from episode 107 of the NASA “Houston We Have a Podcast” in which Frank White, space philosopher and author, explained the concept of the Overview Effect and hinted at all the possibilities that commercial space missions would bring in terms of awakening people's consciousness about what is really happening around them.

Approach used in developing the project

From an operational perspective, we initially evenly divided the tasks into research, coding, design and pitching among us three. However, as we did (and probably still do) not have an extensive experience in game development and design, we took a trial-and-error approach which ended up costing us some time. We however pushed through, sacrificed some sleep and managed to get as far as we could.

In developing snippets of the game, we used the game development software Unity (https://unity.com/) and the programming language C# to create clickable dialogues and animations.

In designing our prototype demo, we opted for a phone-based visualization. For that, we used framer (https://framer.com/projects/) to design the tabs of the app, and InVision (https://www.invisionapp.com/) to link the tabs together in a sequential way.

The demo was then put on a Google Site-hosted website as a video.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

In developing our project, we used content related to the Apollo 11 mission (which is the mission we provided in the game) from nasa.gov/. We used articles and videos to better understand the mission and the operations in a mission control room, as well as to develop a scenario for the scenes shown in the demo. We also used images from that same source in the design of the prototype, and 3D model for game development.