Team Tyro - Space Apps Challenge

Team Tyro| Mission to Planet Earth: A Digital History

Awards & Nominations

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

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.

Stories with Captain Ham and Friends

Summary

Captain Ham and his friends will take you on an incredible journey of learning about the Earth, space, and beyond, working on the challenge ‘Mission to Planet Earth: A Digital History’. Stories from the Captains are demonstrated in the form of engaging videos topped with facts. Apart from these videos, we also provide audio resources as well as reading materials. With these materials, we provide quizzes for brainstorming and weekly leaderboards to foster a competitive spirit. Our website is all about helping people learn about NASA Earth-Science and space missions in a comical way because learning should be fun. We hope our Captains will make your journey interesting and informative.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We developed a website to learn about NASA Earth-Science enterprise as well as other space exploration activities in a fun learning way which includes videos, audios and reading materials with quizzes and leaderboards.

Many people, especially young ones, are not aware about the works that NASA has been doing in the field of space science although they are curious about it. Our website will create an interactive platform for them to learn about the history and missions accomplished by NASA.

Taking a journey through our website, we have an interactive homepage where our visitors will get information about the activities they will be doing. We begin with an introduction to Captain Ham and his friends; Captain Moo, Captain Rocket, Captain Sandy, Captain Baby and Captain Maicha. Scrolling down, our visitors will learn about the services we will be providing i.e. audios, videos as well text documents. We have created quizzes at the end of every story and also a weekly online leaderboard.

Moving on, on the top of the homepage, we have an option to the second page written as ‘explore’ . By clicking on that ,visitors will be taken to the next page where we have stored our contents. Our stories are categorized into four topics: Universe, Earth, Solar System and Humans in Space. As our visitors choose their category, they can see the stories of that category. Visitors can explore more topics too and then click on any topic they want which will direct them to three options: audio, video and text. Visitors can choose an option they want to learn from. At the end of the video, audio and reading documents we have quizzes with a weekly global leaderboard (*to be made). Going further, we have an ‘about us’ page where visitors can learn about our team and team members as well as the characters they will be playing.

We hope to provide information to every visitor and make their learning fun-filled with facts. Along with providing information, we also aim to inspire more young minds in the field of space technology.

How We Developed This Project

Many people are fascinated by the topic of space and are keen to explore more on this topic. Many resources are available both online and offline for the study but some are not accessible while most of them are not easily understood. While many adults may have access to these resources, most of these resources are not child friendly. Also the recent pandemic situation increased the importance of digital learning platforms as an important means of learning. These factors inspired us to create a website boasting a fun learning environment.

For the beginning of this project, we went through NASA’s video ‘how it all began’ as well as several other NASA related videos. We also explored NASA’s official website along with NASA’s Earth Science website. This helped us in learning about different space activities and we came up with the idea to provide this information to the common people. Thinking about the ways of demonstration, we planned to make a video and to make this video accessible to a large audience, we created a website. For developing said website, we used the platform of WordPress and a free hosting service. Videos were created with the help of Adobe Premier Pro, Adobe Illustrator, Animiz and Adobe Character Animator.

When it comes to actual work, problems always appear. Being a group of amateurs, we didn't have proper knowledge for creating a fully fledged website or the use of domains and hosts. While working on this website, our website got suspended once, so we had to start the development from scratch. Creating animated characters and videos were also challenging for us. We learned about the creation of websites. We also have knowledge about creating and editing of videos now. Along with these videos, we also learned about NASA and its different space exploration activities.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

For the completion of this project, we used NASA’s resources such as its videos and images. We took the reference of the NASA’s videos named ‘NASA 60th:How it all began’ and ‘Explorer 1: First U.S. Satellite’ along with some of its images and gifs from NASA’s image gallery and some other open source sites. In NASA Earth Science division, the missions were divided into many categories. So using that information we categorized our stories into different topics. Along with NASA’s resources, we used other open source sites too.

Project Demo

The demo video for our project can be viewed through the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P29gAtJtCiY

Adding to that, our project website is:

http://storieswithham.unaux.com/

Incase the above site doesn’t work our backup site can be used which is not currently in public mode, therefore the username and password is also attached:

http://ashmaspaceapp.flywheelsites.com/

Username: spaceapps

Password: qaz wsx edc

Our additional submission links includes:

Video on “The start of Satellite”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2-jAhHlpaU

Audio for “The start of Satellites”

https://soundcloud.com/team-tyro/start-of-satellites