Awards & Nominations
Marcianos Salvadoreños has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Global Nominee
GuanacoNautas
High-Level Project Summary
While almost everyone knows, or at least imagines that interplanetary spaceflight poses an extremely difficult challenge with high risks for humans, few people, and specially young students, really understand what these risks are, how they directly affect an astronaut’s health, and even less how an astronaut can mitigate them. With the Game App “GuanacoNautas”, a blend of the words Guanaco (a popular salvadoran term) and Astronauts, our goal is not only to awake the Salvadoran adolescents’ curiosity for space science but also make them aware of the real-life solutions that NASA scientists use in spaceflight, through an interactive, user friendly, and personalized Salvadoran-style fun game.
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
When the users enter the App, they will have the option to start a journey
They will have to choose a character to be the Astronaut for a mission to Mars. They will have 5 options of characters: from which 2 will be popular characters from Salvadoran mythology, 1 option to choose a female Salvadoran scientist, 1 option to choose a male Salvadoran scientist, and 1 option to be themselves with whichever gender they want.
When selecting the female or male scientist option, the idea is that a list of Salvadoran scientist will pop and let the user choose one, a short description of the scientist will be shown as well. The reason we want to make it this way is that we want the youth to get to know some of the scientists that El Salvador has had and feel inspired by them, as well as have fun with some popular characters.
After that, the engineer from Mission Control will give them a warm welcome and prepare them with the necessary information of what they will face in their trip through space all the way to Mars and back to Earth.
Once started their journey, the GuanacoNauta in the game will encounter on a continual basis the hazards that NASA’s Human Research Program has organized into the five classifications: Radiation, Isolation, Distance, Gravity fields, Closed/hostile environments.
Because the game is intended to be educational yet user friendly, it would be programed to threat and warn the GuanacoNauta with one or more hazards on a specific time frame, and show different options of what the GuanacoNauta can do and they will have to select the one they think is correct, based on what they have learned on the “training” they received before the journey.
If they select the wrong option, the GuanacoNauta will do the task but the hazard will not lessen and will keep affecting them, until they do the right task.
An option linking to why is that the adequate solution and the scientific research behind it provided by NASA will be available for the user to learn about it at more depth.
To create the prototype app we used different tools like Windows 10 tools, Photoshop, App inventor 2 online, QR code screenshot App, Android mobile, and Google tools. However, due to time limit, the app itself was not finished, but we still wanted to present the concept of the game, as we believe would be a fun and educational game for middle schoolers.
Space Agency Data
Hackathon Journey
All the preparation process and journey for the Hackathon has given us a different perception of each challenge, we learned that there are many ways and methods in which we can reach a common goal, and that solve a problem, we have to start with the simplest tasks.
We focused on "The Trail to Mars: Can You Keep Your Crew Alive" challenge because we know that children (especially those between 10 to 14 years old) are full of questions nowadays. However, they still do not consider or measure the size of the risks that completing these tasks and responsibilities in each spaceflight brings.
Our objective as a team at all times to work well was good communication, helping each other, giving us ideas and looking for solutions together. We would like to thank Undersecretary Frabrizio Mena for his support and motivation given to young people and adults from all study fields to take the opportunity and participate in this challenge. Special thanks to the organizers and speaker of every webinar facilitated to us and every mentoring session.
References
Tags
#GuanacoNautas #inspirational #spaceflight #mars #spaceexploration #astronauts
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.