Ceres - Space Apps Challenge

Ceres| Mission to Planet Earth: A Digital History

Awards & Nominations

Ceres has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Local Peoples' Choice Winner

Global Nominee

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.

SATELION

Summary

Our platform is a fully customizable adventure game for kids. Satelion guides the user through different scenarios while teaching and exploring earth sciences developed by NASA. We conscientize the populations about wildlife journeys and climate change by using real data. We use several datasets from https://www.data.gov/ to not only track but to teach the adversities and diversities in our environment. From polar bears to loons, fire and hurricanes. We are committed to spread the research already developed onto next generations who will preserve and understand our home planet.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We develop a playful video game

SATELION is important to understand how the datasets crafted by the satellites around the world help to care and preserve life on earth. The video game creates consciousness in players about life on earth and science in space.

SATELION creates different interactive games with kids through missions including: finding animals, care and preserving, natural disasters, climate change among others. Missions are split into two worlds where the gamer will progress as the story happens. The characters feature skills that enable them to accomplish the missions in a smarter and faster way, keeping the gamer tuned in to the message we want to communicate.

Popup boxes will show up during the game to deliver information helping the gamer to solve the challenge and giving information acquired from the datasets.Our gamers rise their earthling skills as they pass levels, we have synthesized the datasets and have sorted the skills by the gamer having the ability of identifying earthquakes, water conditions, landslides, migratory movements, species and taxonomic features.

Geology, geography and wildlife sciences never have been closer. The use of the NASA datasets lets us gamify the understanding of our home planet to the next level! SATELION is an interactive game that will reach and educate next generations to understand and preserve.

How We Developed This Project

We used mainly C# as a development language to develop all the frameworks and tasks to read the datasets provided by NASA ( https://www.data.gov/ ), process the data and create interactive maps in different MVP of Xamarin and Unity. As we had the datasets into several CSV files, we had to finally use FireBase to store and retrieve online the data in our solution. We used preprocessed data, so all we need was to extract locations and roughly descriptions of the events/living beings.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We used datasets about events and wildlife on earth but also several graphic and technical resources to create and develop the narrative story of our videogame.