Tranquility

Tranquility| Mission to Planet Earth: A Digital History

Awards & Nominations

Tranquility 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.

Summary

This is an interactive website for middle school students to be able to learn more about the Earth Sciences with information and images from NASA. The bite sized learning enables them to quickly grasp concepts and the quiz for each topic helps ensure mastery.

How I Addressed This Challenge

The challenge was to think like a historian and an educator, I decided that due to the COVID-19 pandemic we need more resources for teachers to have engaging resources for their virtual learners. I wanted to share NASA's amazing knowledge and science in a fun and interactive way for students to get them excited about learning. This is important because teachers are facing new challenges that they have to engage students in learning while being physically in different locations. Currently my website has 4 domains to learn about, Bio Diversity, Ozone, Our Oceans and the Icy Arctic, there are mini-topics within each domain. The students have short paragraphs to read on each topic and then there is a quiz with pictures that will give them immediate feedback on if they understood the topic. I hope to add scoring and a login in the future so that students can keep track of their progress throughout their learning.

How I Developed This Project

I wanted to do a coding based topic, creating a website where I could help the world in some way. This seemed like a perfect challenge as it asked for digital tools with an interactive experience. I used JavaScript and React.js for this project. I included an npm package for the quiz component. The problems I ran into were issues with passing an onclick event to a child component and then deploying the site to gh-pages made the links (routing) no longer work.

How I Used Space Agency Data in This Project

I used resources that I found on the resources page for this project.

The data I used was used in creating topics, then smaller text to teach middle schoolers science. I also developed quiz questions based on what the topic was.

NASA and the Environment: The Case of Ozone Depletion by W. Henry Lambright, 2005

Understanding Earth: Biodiversity and Ecological Forecasting

Understanding Earth: Our Ocean

Understanding Earth: The Icy Arctic

Image

https://unsplash.com/photos/yZygONrUBe8

https://unsplash.com/photos/8Hjx3GNZYeA