Team ERRANTE is an international team of aerospace engineers passionate about space science and exploration.
Thanks to our motivation and enthusiasm we focused on finding a way of combining learning and having fun. After all, our motto ‘Create, learn, PLAY!’ defines us. We wanted to foster kids’ interest in science by providing them with a videogame that allows them to make their way through the stars and build their own universe. For this reason, we designed STARDUST.
This game offers a wide range of possibilities, like creating your own star, choosing its features, that will match an existing one from NASA’s database, and learning how stars and planetary systems are formed. You can customize your planet improving its characteristics, since its creation throughout its whole lifetime. Our main targets are young teenagers that are about to decide their future and we hope to encourage them towards STEM careers.
We tried to design an interactive, exciting and fascinating game, developing intuition through a cause-effect concept, without forgetting that, just like in real life, anything can happen! Users' choices have a great influence on future possibilities but are limited by scientific data and models (e.g. if your planet doesn’t have a ferromagnetic core, you are not allowed to add a magnetic field). All of this, using the amazing pictures of NASA's repository.
Among the future lines of work, the most important part would be to develop a functional demo, which would require a detailed design phase, in order to better define the existing relationships between the different elements of the game. Also, multiplatform architecture can be implemented. Finally, we would like to include several additional features like minigames, multiplayer options and a Minecraft-inspired logic.
We thought our game’s infrastructure could be based on the following databases and repositories:
https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/index.html
https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/cgi-bin/TblView/nph-tblView?app=ExoTbls&config=planets
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/
You can find all our project in our repository: https://github.com/maritaconf/NASA-Space-Apps-Challenge-Team-Errante
Credits: PPT template by Slidesgo.