Galactic turtles| Sustaining Our Planet for Future Generations
Awards & Nominations
Galactic turtles has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Sustaining Our Planet for Future Generations
Earth Defenders - Let's save our planet
Summary
Earth Defenders is an app that will help kids and teenagers get to know more about the environmental issues that each world's continent is facing. In addition, this app will not just teach kids about each continent green issues but also motivate them to act on them by suggesting tips for them to do their bit for the planet. Moreover, the app encourages children to share their new knowledge with their family and friends.
How We Addressed This Challenge
What did you develop? Why is it important?
We developed a mobile app's prototype of a game. We think this app is important because it will not only help kids from all over the world learn about environmental issues that our planet is facing at the moment but also motivate children to take action on our planet's green problems.
What does it do? How does it work?
The app introduces a friendly character, a time traveler from 2100, year in which the Earth is dying and this traveler is asking the user for her/his help to save Earth from this terrible faith.
The child is asked to go through every continent to help them with their environmental issues.
Each continent will have:
- Stories
- Mini games
Stories
All continents have stories about different animals that struggle for their life because of ecological problems, such as: deforestation, rise of sea levels, climate change, carbon footprint, etc. These stories have animals as protagonists, in this way kids will empathize more with these protagonists, feel how all these problems are truly affecting their lives in a negative way and will try to do more about it in order to help the planet.
Mini games
Mini games are introduced after the kid finishes the story. Each mini game is about a way to help the protagonist with her/his problem. With these mini games we tried to make the app more interactive for the kids so in this way children will want to play it more and learning will be more fun. As the kid finishes each task, the child will gain points and this will help to keep him entertained.
Furthermore, some tips about how can they help will be shown as they finish the level and we also added a ranking in order that the kids will compete so they will be more motivated to gain points.
What do you hope to achieve?
We really hope that this app will raise awareness in kids about Earth's green problems and encourage them to step in on these by following the tips shown in the app and spreading the word of the knowledge they got from it. Taking care of the Earth is very important and it's important to conscious about the environmental issues at a very young age. We've seen that kids can change our world and even adult's views on it so why not to start with the little ones?
How We Developed This Project
What inspired your team to choose this challenge?
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not. -Dr. Seuss, The Lorax
We are young people that grew up watching Wall-e and The Lorax, these stories helped us as kids to become more conscious about our planet and that small actions can really help our world to become a better place for humans as well as for everyone living here.
Children are the future of the world, and if they grow up taking care of the planet now, they will have a healthy planet in the future that will benefit the life of the new generations.
We really think kids are the future and that they have power, we can even see how in the present many kids and teenagers are taking action on climate change. For example: Young Voices For The Planet, Helena Gualinga, and Greta Thunberg. All these kids are raising their voice and addressing Earth's problems. We want more kids to raise their voice for the planet.
What was your approach to developing this project?
We focus a lot on the application being attractive for children, we used bright colors, large fonts, and made the application interactive and competitive in order to the children have the desire to play it while they learn.
In order to reach older people, in the application we encourage the children to tell their family and friends what they learned.
What tools, coding languages, hardware, software did you use to develop your project?
We developed this prototype using Adobe XD, the most icons and images were designed by us using Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop, and others icons were taken from www.freepik.com and www.flaticon.com. We also used github to manage the versions of the project.
What problems and achievements did your team have?
The main problem that our team had was the manage of the time, because we had to do a lot of things in a short time for this hackathon, other problem with our team had to deal was that Adobe XD does not support a good real time collaboration in the same file, and we had to work in different files and then copy and paste our work between the files (this brings us some problems too), which caused us some time lost.
The achievements that our team had were definitely all the new things that all we learned while we developed this project, it was very fun to work thogether, and the best we gain is the feeling that with our project we are contributing our bit in this fight to save our planet for future generations.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
We tried to make these important data more understandable for kids and have more impact on them. In each story, the protagonist tells the kid a fact that we took from NASA. Also the advice given in the app is taken from NASA climate kids . In addition, we plan to create a youtube channel that will provide the kids with more information but as animated videos so they will enjoy learning about these problems.
Project Demo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwovVMsRmJs&ab_channel=HopkinsHerbas
Data & Resources
Soares-Filho B.S., D.C. Nepstad, L.M. Curran, E. Voll, G.C. Cerqueira, R.A. Garcia, C.A. Ramos, A. McDonald, P. Lefebvre, and P. Schlesinger. 2013.LBA-ECO LC-14 Modeled Deforestation Scenarios, Amazon Basin: 2002-2050. Data set. Available on-line (http:daac.ornl.gov) from Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, U.S.A. http://dx.doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1153
Soares, B.S., Nepstad, D.C., Curran, L.M., Cerqueira, G.C., Garcia, R.A., Ramos, C.A., Voll, E., McDonald, A., Lefebvre, P. & Schlesinger, P. 2006. Modelling conservation in the Amazon basin. Nature 440, 520-523.
https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
https://climate.nasa.gov/effects/