High-Level Project Summary
In order to help people to understand, in a fun way, the process of space exploration, we´ve designed an European-style board game. We´ve realize that people´s consciousness about national space agencies, space missions developement or planet compositions are low (at least from our point of view). So that, the goal we´ve set to achive is improving people´s space exploration knowledge from an unconsciously, interactively and entertainingly way. Odysspace fulfills these requirements. It shows , in a simpllyfied manner, how a space agency is organized, how space missions are developed, how far solar system planets are from Earth and how are they made of , etc. Always different.
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
Our project "Odysspace" is a board game designed to help people to understad space exploration through a fictional mission in which players represent a different space agency fighting for the collection of resource materials from the different planets of the Solar System. The player with the highest amount of raw materials will be the winner of the game.
The functioning of the game is already explained before (see Link to Final Project). The main benefit that the game can provide is that players can learn in an enjoyable way real data related to space because, although the context and the functioning of the game has been all created by us, it is based in true facts about space exploration, and our objective is that people could learn it without even realizing.
We have only developed the design of the game, but if it was constructed, it would be mainly made of paper and cardboard. Since it is a board game, any computer resource or software is required to play it.
Space Agency Data
The space agency data we used is mainly the information we found in the webpages of the agencies. We studied general information about the different steps that a space mission requires, spaceships, planets, robots, agencies...
The information related to space agencies was useful to create the cards of each player, since they are representing one of the 4 space agencies of the game. For these cards we also searched for information about different departments in NASA, in order to help the player to pretend being part of a real mission in which all those departments must work.
Information about planet conditions, robots, spaceships, raw materials, etc. was used to design the rest of the cards of the game. Our objective is that people could learn with our game in an unconscious way. That's why all that information is shown in the cards, so, when players take the different cards, they will read true information about real missions, spaceships...
Lastly, we also used some images from the NASA archives to design some cards of the game.
Hackathon Journey
It has been a very good experience, in which teamwork and cooperation have been fundamental to develop our project. It has been a good opportunity to learn about space exploration, the functioning of space sgencies, how missions work, planets of the Solar System..., because we had to develop a game in which all these knowledge has to be easily available for the players. So, we had to study carefully how to achieve that, at the same time that we were designing a board game from the very beggining.
We have not had any important setback during the journey. When we were a little bit blocked, we stopped a few hours to think individually how to solve the problem that we had, and, at the end, we always had very good ideas that helped us to keep going.
References
- Google Drive
- Google Meet
- Canva
- National Geographic
- NASA's webpage: https://www.nasa.gov/
- Wikipedia: https://es.wikipedia.org/