High-Level Project Summary
A role-playing game that serves the purpose of teaching students how to build low-cost high altitude balloons (HAB) capable of reaching near space (about 30km above sea level). Students will roleplay as the main character who will follow a series of quests to build a zero-pressure balloon (ZPB) from scratch with the aid of some friendly astronauts. In this lesson plan, students learn how to build HAB by interacting with the Astronauts, NPCs in HAB-IT. Students can gain hands-on experience in building HABs while playing HAB-IT.
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
HAB-IT is an RPG that provides the students with an indulging experience with building the HAB themselves from 0 to 100. The students will solve a series of quests introduced by the NPCs to collect materials, set up the flight computer, and a variety of preparations. Through HAB-IT, we wish to get rid of the stereotype of gaming being an inhibitor of youth's growth. Instead, gaming can be educational as well. In HAB-IT, the students can gain hands-on experience in building HAB, compared with the plain theoretical syllabus in their textbook.
Space Agency Data
https://www.weather.gov/chs/upperair
https://www.met.gov.my/
Hackathon Journey
We had definitely enjoyed ourselves and had tons of fun in the Space Apps Challenge. During the hackathon period, we have worked together to create a lesson plan called HAB-IT that aims to teach students how to build a low-cost HAB.
We had gained a considerable amount of knowledge about high-altitude balloons in general. Besides that, we also learned how to manage our time wisely and how to communicate as a team.
We chose this project because we are interested in everything about high-altitude balloons, from planning to launching to recovery, and want to share this knowledge with others. We did a lot of research about HABs on the internet, mostly from reading online articles and watching HABs-related videos on YouTube. Then, we have come up with the idea of making our lesson plan into a minigame, where the idea of HAB-IT is born.
We definitely had faced a number of setbacks and challenges during the hackathon period. One of the challenges we faced is we were unable to hold face-to-face or physical meetings due to the fact that we are staying far away from one another and our movement is restricted due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
We would like to express our gratitude to NASA and the people behind the NASA Space Apps Challange for organizing such an exciting and knowledge-bringing hackathon for people around the world to participate in. This is truly an eye-opener for us.
References
Tags
#balloon, #highaltitudeballoon, #HAB, #near-space, #space, #nasa
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.