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.

Project Earth

Summary

Project Earth is the breakthrough innovation application that aims to make education more fun and interactive. The app is in a form of simulation game where a user can explore land forms and other historical geological places that are filled with facts and trivia. The user will be asked to clear tasks related to the current location in order for them to move to the next location. The app can be accessed via mobile or PC. Furthermore, this app can also be incorporated in VR platform to give users a more realistic and immersive experience. Given the current situation of our world right now, using this revolutionary app allows users to learn and explore in the most accessible and fun way.

How We Addressed This Challenge

With the current situation where our actions are very limited due to pandemic, the amount of knowledge or information we can gain directly is very much limited as well. For this reason, learning has become more challenging than ever, especially for the younger generation. They are forced to stay in front of a computer and bombarded by facts and trivia from a virtual representation of their class. Not only does this proves to be a poor condition for children to completely grasp the information being fed to them, this set up is also very prone to distraction as games and videos that they consider fun are just one click away. Not only does this pose as a problem for the advancement of your child’s learning, but this also makes our dedicated educators' job a lot harder. They need to prepare for all the topics that they can present. They need to rack their brain just to come up with a way to make the lesson entertaining for their students. And during the class, they are required to brace themselves for any upcoming network or connection problem that hinders the smooth and cohesive transition of the knowledge they are trying to share. Such educational scenario is definitely far from ideal.


But, what if we combine the knowledge from the school lessons, the fun from a game, and the accessibility from a software into a single app? The group has decided to make an app that allows users to learn and have fun in the process. Using the data from NASA, the group made an app that takes users to real location, either present or historical. The user needs to accomplish tasks for them to move to another location. By accomplishing tasks, the user will learn information about the said location (Ex. Mount Apo).

How We Developed This Project

During brainstorming, one goal was common to all members. How to make the lives of the people easier given the so called New Normal. As the discussion continues, the team decided to settle on education. How are we going to make education easier given that it is done online? With the experience of some of our members with game dev, we have decided to make a highly education game.


After deciding what to do, we divided the tasks among us. Some will focus on the actual dev using "Unity" while some focuses on translating data to visual representation. There have been several challenges faced by the group. The biggest one was actually during the planning face. What are we going to make? However, after deciding on this matter, it became a lot easier. Though some members are new to Unity, they are all very eager to learn and was able to immediately grasp how to use the said game dev engine. Until the completion of the project, everyone remained motivated and dedicated to make this project a success.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We used the data provided by the NASA Earth Observatory maps to replicate some of the topographic features of the area, including the vegetation and its metabolism. The net radiation, land surface temperature, as well as optical depth were also considered in recreating the light refractive index.

Tags
#EARTH #Education #InteractiveGame #OpenWorld
Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Judging process.