Cosmic Narrators

Cosmic Narrators| 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.

Summary

Our project was commissioned to retell and present a specific topic and point in time-related to Earth Science and its grounding impact today, more precisely the mission of Apollo 11.Methods of our work include web development and designing, data gathering and redacting, storytelling-narrative writing, and ultimately, product presenting and marketing. Currently, the project is in its early stages of development, so further updates will be made to it. Our team worked hard to create a simple educational digital tool, easily accessed by anyone and based on up to date sources of information. The project has run into some limitations, that include our inability to present our idea as an app.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We worked to develop an interactive website, which can be easily accessed by any user. We think that such compact and easy-to-use websites would help pupils across the world get a better understanding of scientific topics, such as earth science, and its lasting effect and legacy it leaves behind. It currently informs students (our target group) about NASA's missions, specifically Apollo 11. Educating the younger generations to come is our primary goal, as this way we can help ground a well-informed and intelligent community, who in such soils is bound to blossom.

How We Developed This Project

After thorough consideration, we chose this challenge, because it truly spoke to us. As teens we're very familiar with suffocating sources of information that often feel like never-ending mazes, so we felt we needed to create something as user-friendly as possible. We used HTML, CSS and JS. Our team ran into a problem while making a typewriter effect in JS, but we figured it out.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

The data provided in the Resources tab of our challenge was definitely helpful and organised in such a way that we were be able to access it freely. At first we went through all the sites and transcripts it provided to eventually select the ones we needed most, ones that were most relevant to our topic. Then we skimmed through and chose the exact points in time we needed to create a full picture of the story. At last our team worked on the retelling and narrating it, based on the data mentioned previously.

Judging

This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Judging process.