Peak Performers| 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.

Rooms Of Information

Summary

It was essential to teach people the important contributions that NASA made to our planet Earth, and how these contributions have the same importance to us as exploring the space. We then developed an interactive game to help the user learn about the contributions that NASA made to Earth. The game consists of rooms, every room contains one contribution that NASA made to Earth. The demo version of our game contains 3 contributions: CubeSat, GRACE-Fo, and The Amazon Fires. Once the user clicks on the button associated with every contribution, it displays a video that calcifies the contribution. By that way, we are able to make people learn about their planet but in an entertaining way.

How We Addressed This Challenge

The interactive game that we developed is a simulation of Datasets of NASA and other Space Agencies but in a simple way that user can interact with and enjoy browsing the game, this game has been developed using a Game Engine called Unity, It consists of a digital interactive space museum, the museum consists of chambers, each chamber explains a certain NASA and Other Agencies achievements, Technology, and Missions in Earth Science, also the game offers Resources for each topic that we presented in the game so the user can browse more information about the topic he interested in. This game targets young and adult audience to spread the knowledge of NASA Earth Science.

How We Developed This Project

NASA has always been very successful in its space-related discoveries and inventions. That's why if you ever heard the word NASA, you will more likely think of something space-related. However, NASA has many great achievements in Earth Science. 


That's the reason we picked the "Mission to Planet Earth: A Digital History" challenge. we want to use interactive and new technologies to spread the knowledge of NASA's Earth Science Information.


We started by collecting some data related to some interesting topics like discoveries and Technologies related to Earth Science. We made a brief explanation of CubeSat, GRACE-FO mission, Nasa's contributions to amazon fires.


Then we used a free open-source game engine called "Unity" in addition to Microsoft visual to write C# code, the code is responsible for some movement mechanics and event systems. We also used the "Physics for scientists and engineers- by Raymond A. Serway" to program natural movement into the game's physics.


Some of the problems that faced us were map building, it was difficult to build everything from scratch, but we used a tool called Pro builder grid, which helped us build baselines for the maps. then we used some free assets from the unity asset store. to speed up the building process.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

Since our project was mainly to build an interactive tool that inform people about NASA earth work, we needed trusted information from a trusted source, so NASA was one of our sources of information in our project it provided us with information, photos and 3d models to build interactive buttons for the project.

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Data & Resources
Tags
#interactive_game#technology#misssions#Earthscience#game
Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Judging process.