Samaúma - Space Apps Challenge

Samaúma| Sustaining Our Planet for Future Generations

Sustaining Our Planet for Future Generations

There is concern worldwide that environmental issues we face today will have an impact on future generations. Your challenge is to create a way to communicate the importance of environmental responsibility to people of all ages.

Samaúma Project

Summary

In front of environmental challenges and technological transformation, with the goal of accelerating and fostering the transformation of positive attitudes about the environment, we developed an app for smartphones focused on environmental education, that uses games as a teaching method to children from 5 to 11, but not exclusive to this public. The main activity of the app is attend biological necessities of a plant, that will be a “virtual pet”, thus as the user learns more about problems the environment faces and elaborates solutions, they will build up empathy and will be encouraged to take care of its environment in each challenge, which we hope will become a habit to most of the users.

How We Addressed This Challenge

The game has as main objective promoting the caring about a personal plant, that will face real challenges that happen in nature, it will be under the responsibility of the child or adult who will be playing. As a “virtual pet”, the player will have to take care of their plant in a way that keeps it healthy and protected from climate changes, damages caused by pollution and human negative actions. At a certain point of the game, it is possible to notice that some activities can only be executed if the player has learnt how to deal with the environment and face the challenges that will be proposed. And it is based on this playful and interactive methodology that the game will encourage curiosity and interest about their responsibility with the environment. With the appropriate support, we hope to embrace new functionalities that the current resources limit, such as plant collections, integration between players to create a forest together and operation of GPS.

How We Developed This Project

The Samaúma Crew chose this challenge because it enabled the creation of a solution for one of the big problems in our state, the lack of applications and projects about environmental responsibility, we live right by the largest river of the world and by the biggest rainforest park of the world, and yet less than half of the schools of the state suggest projects about this topic, and we believe we share this problem with other places in the world. We used the MIT APP Inventor as the main software and we followed the strategy of rule out the ideas that our application limited, in order to make it as responsive as possible. And in a playful and dynamic way, we proposed the idea of a game that encourages curiosity, and that can awake interest from children to adults about their responsibility with the environment.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We used the space agencies data as the base for the creation of the idea and for the implementation of the project, which brought us quickness and a clean direction of what we were developing based on our vision of changing the environmental responsibility. In addition to using the data and material directed to children such as Climate Kids from NASA, we used data from ESSEA Courses to define the challenges in the game, and the player’s dashboard was filled by the data and evidence from Climate NASA to support the curiosities, and thereby find the best didactic and information to make the project fun for everyone.