https://youtu.be/D9IDlxzIyzg

https://canelit4.itch.io/smars

SMARS is an educational video game that consists of 5 levels, each one with 2 missions. Each level explores the routines and challenges crewmembers face when travelling to Mars. At the beginning of the videogame, an introduction is presented, it informs about the year in which the astronauts are located, how long their trip will last and why (all with the links for more information on these details). After the brief introduction, the player will be able to choose the captain and his crew according to their abilities. It should be noted that throughout the game, a narrator character (representing the ground control) will accompany the crew, guiding them on missions and providing interesting information.

Level 1 explores challenges in the daily activities of the crew. In mission 1 the character will have to cook his breakfast, he will be able to choose his meal of the day from the menu. The narrator tells you about the food in space and gives links of interest. In mission 2 the character will be in need of using the bathroom, but the mission does not end there, he gets an alarm indicating the leakage of water in the bathroom and he will have to solve it before the timer reaches 0. If the avatar could solve it, the narrator character will congratulate him and explain the relevance of water in space, and how 90% of the urine is recycled to turn it into drinking water.

At the first mission of level 2, the avatar will begin to observe the consequences of gravity on his body, due to this, he will have to go to the gym and exercise so that he does not suffer from muscle loss due to gravity. After this exhaustive training, he will have to bathe with the special wipes astronauts use in space. While the avatar returns to his room they will find the second mission in which the button that regulates the light will have to return to its place so that it does not affect the crew’s sleep, thus ending his day sleeping.

At level 3, our first encounter with Mars will begin, in mission 1 the avatar will wake up and observe on the ship’s screens that there is little left to reach Mars, shortly before landing, an alarm will go out warning of a leak in the tank of methane, the avatar will be able to observe the importance of the methane tank in the landing, he will have to repair it before they begin to land on Mars. After having landed on Mars, mission 2 will begin, with the character exploring this new planet. While exploring, one of his partners runs out of air, he has to go for another oxygen tank to the ship, before the timer ticks 0, otherwise, his partner could die.

At level 4, on the way back to Earth, an alert will appear warning that the food is running out, you will have to take care of the garden to supply food to the entire crew. In the second mission, the character wakes up and goes to the communications room to make a call with his family, he realizes that the communication machine is broken, he will have to repair it before this damages him emotionally.

At level 5, the character will be sleeping when he hears an alarm from all sides, solar flares have just started, once they have passed, the ship goes into code red due to a mechanical failure of the cabin caused by the solar flares, the character will have to repair it before the timer reaches 0, otherwise, the crew will confront serious consequences due to space radiation. Then you will realize you are not so far from Earth, while the crew sat in their respective seats, the ship enters code red again, a piece of the ship left its place, the avatar will have to repair it so that the air stops leaking into the ship and affects the landing. 

Our educational video game, SMARS, helps children and teenagers to learn with information from reliable sources, about the trips that are made to space in general, in this case, to Mars, as well as the risks that are encountered on long trips. We want to inspire children and teenagers to become future astronauts and scientists. In addition, we would like that teachers and mentors to use this game as an educational tool for science and technology classes. Before starting our project, we use Figma and Miro as tools to write and organize better our ideas. Then, to develop and carry out our project, we have used Unity as our main software and for the coding languages, ​​we used C #.

GitHub: https://github.com/number304/smars

Figma: Introduction

Figma: Level 1

Miro: Ideas

Miro: considerations

Miro: Group organization

The following info was brought to us by NASA. One of these is ¨Mourning Routine in space¨, and we use it as an inspiration to recreate the main rooms of the spaceship on the first level and daily activities and how they can be introduced in our videogame.

Following with level 1, we also used ¨STEMonstrations: Water Filtrations¨ and ¨New Brine Processor Increases Water Recycling on the Stations¨ to elaborate the design and mechanics of the bathroom in the second mission in which water filtration is at risk.

¨Bone and Muscle Loss in Microgravity¨, ¨Risk of Impaired Performance Due to Reduced Muscle Mass, Strength, and Endurance¨ and ¨The Human Body in Space¨ helped us gathering information for the second mission of level 2, therefore we were able to build a gym in the spaceship.

For the crew, we reached for ¨NASA Selects U.S. Citizens for Ground-Based Simulation of Life in Space¨ and ¨NASA Selects Crew for Simulated Trip to a Mars Moon¨ in order to know better about real astronauts and we divided them into very specific groups so that way we labelled the characters in-game based on real information about real astronauts.

Our experience as a team in the Space Apps Challenge has been of great productivity, we were able to know more about each other and we developed the project without complications. We learned and acquired new skills, some members of the group improved at design or coding videogames while others enhanced their writing skills, research and translation. What most inspired us to choose this particular challenge was being able to inspire kids and teenagers to be pioneers of future missions. Therefore, our biggest focus and time was expended in searching for valuable and verified information so that we could share it with our audience.

One of the challenges we experienced was that 3 members of the group had to withdraw due to personal problems, and we had to look for new members. We managed to find them, whom we thank for working with them. We would like to thank the family of each one of us, who understood and supported us from the beginning of the hackathon and especially in the days when we had to pull an all-nighter.

Information related to routines in space:

https://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/stem-on-station/ditl_morning_routine 

Information related to water conservation in space:

https://www.nasa.gov/stemonstrations-water-filtration.html 

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-brine-processor-increases-water-recycling-on-international-space-station/ 

https://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/releases/2020/nasa-marshall-engineers-refine-hardware-apply-innovative-solutions-to-more-reliably-recycle.html 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgM qxd VAlA&ab channel=VideoFromSpace 

Information related to the impact of microgravity in the body and exercise:

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/station-science-101/bone-muscle-loss-in-microgravity/ 

https://humanresearchroadmap.nasa.gov/Evidence/reports/Muscle.pdf 

https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/bodyinspace 

Information about the crew

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-selects-crew-for-simulated-trip-to-a-mars-moon

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-selects-us-citizens-for-ground-based-simulation-of-life-in-space

Information about space radiation

https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/nasaandyou/home/radiation_bkgd_sp.html

http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0026-17422015000300013

Information about Solar Flares

https://www.spaceweather.com/glossary/flareclasses_spanish.html

https://www.uchile.cl/noticias/175180/tormentas-solares-incidencia-para-la-tierra-y-la-exploracion-espacial

https://hesperia.gsfc.nasa.gov/rhessi3/mission/science/the-impact-of-flares/index.html

https://www.britannica.com/video/183276/overview-solar-flares

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094576515303301

#Mars #crew #space #educational #videogame

This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.