High-Level Project Summary
Journey to Mars is an educational videogame where an astronaut travels to Mars and must be prepared for his mission.In space he will have to face psychological and physical risks until he reach Mars and return to Earth alive.We respond to the challenge The Trail to Mars in which we inform children about the risks of a mission to Mars in an entertaining way as children learn faster through games. It's important because it inspires children to want to be astronauts and it was create to share what we investigated.
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
Journey to Mars
Videogame cover
What is Journey to Mars?
Journey to Mars is an educational videogame where an astronaut travels to Mars and must be prepared for his mission.
In space he will have to exercise to strengthen his muscles and face microgravity, he must deal with sleep interruptions, also he cannot contact his loved ones when he wants, he must steer the ship to avoid meteorites. On Mars he must avoid dust storms and finally return to Earth alive.
How to play it?
The game begins with a short story about astronaut Ned (avatar) who is now ready to go to Mars.
First Ned need to exercise so that his body can bear the risk of microgravity, in this level he will have to lift weights 60 times, use the up and down arrows to achieve it. Now Ned is ready for the rocket launch.
Level 1
After, he is trapped in a meteor shower, so he must pilot the spaceship to avoid them. To play it use the keys W to go up, S to go down, A left, D right. In this level if it crashes, the player loses 5 points per crash, the objective is to survive until reaching 60 points, these are won by dodging the meteorites. This risk is actually a myth and we inform it when the player pass the level.
Level 2
Another level is when he landed on mars, the astronaut has to escape the dust storm, so he doesn't get stuck on Mars. Also, on his return to Earth he will realize that the dust storm managed to interfere with communication, he will have to fix it so that he doesn't feel alone when spending so much time in space and away from home.
At the end of the mission, you will be rewarded with a badge by keeping the astronaut safe.
What benefits does Journey to Mars have?
It's a fun, entertaining game and teaches you about some of the risks that an astronaut can have when traveling to Mars. This will awaken the curiosity of the children to investigate more about these risks and to become more interested in space and astronauts, even inspiring them to be astronauts in the future.
Our vision:
We want to share Journey to Mars with all the countries of the world so that it reaches all children and can inspire and inform them in a fun way.
How we created Journey to Mars?
We use the Scratch platform that uses block programming, so that we could advance in the development of our videogame. We looked for information in reliable sources and choose the risks that caught our attention the most.
Space Agency Data
We were inspired by asking ourselves why only robers traveled to Mars? Why not people could do it?
So we started investigating, the first thing we found was a BBC news article where we began to realize that the risks were very dangerous and we didn't knew that. That is why it is important to solve the challenge The Trail to Mars: Can You Keep Your Crew Alive because of the misinformation that not only children have on this issue but also people in general.
The first risk we took into account was microgravity, that astronauts must have an exercise regimen, since the lack of gravity weakens the muscles, which in turn increases the risk of tendonitis and fat accumulation.
Then we found the dust storms that make the poles melt. Travel to Mars would last more than 6 months and being in confinement causes a lot of stress and not being able to communicate face-to-face with loved ones because of the delay can cause depression and anxiety.
Many people think that spaceships would not survive a meteor shower but this is a myth since the probability of collision is infinitely small: less than one in every billion, we also wanted to put it but more for inform people about this myth and so they no longer believe on it.
Hackathon Journey
For us who are school students, it has been a very nice experience since it is the first time that we participate in the NASA Space Apps Challenge.
We chose this challenge as it seemed to us the most interesting, we made as much progress as we could in the development of the prototype, but we have the idea of the levels that are missing due to the reduced time (2 days) to create the project.
We enjoyed these learning days and we hope you enjoy our project.
References
Tags
#Art, #Programming, #TheTrailToMars, #Scratch, #JourneyToMars, #MarsAndBeyond, #Videogame, #Mars, #Space
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.