Terrestrial Coders

https://www.wevideo.com/view/2393605537

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/575359590/fullscreen/

Marship is a fun game where the player and four other crew mates try to travel to Mars and then back. Players can buy food and water to keep their crew mates full. There are some diseases that may kill crew mates with every chance they get. There are mini-games for collecting rocks, and other fun sidetracks such as an asteroid dodging mini-game too. If all of the crew mates die, then the game ends. When people play Marship, they learn of the health risks on the trip to Mars like blood clots, microgravity muscle damage, and nutrition deficiency. This helps them in their real life trail to space if they become astronauts. We, the Terrestrial Coders, hope that anyone who plays this game learns about the risks in a journey to Mars and how to survive them. We use Scratch to create a beta model.

Players can get points for how they deal with the challenges they face. Marship ranks the players with different point levels from 0 to 20. 0 means total failure. 10 means they succeed to stay alive, but with many damages. 20 means they got out of it alive with zero damage. Damages include diseases, mental illness, and damages to the rocket ship.

Marship randomly makes the players repair some area of the rocket. Players don’t have to repair it immediately, but if the players don't repair it, it can grow and lead to bigger problems. To repair, players have 3 options: #1 is to send down an engineer to fix what’s wrong. This is free, but an engineer can either fix it or do even more damage. #2 is to use points to fix. Generally, this costs a lot of points, but it always works. The last option is to have a weekly or monthly checkup. The machine scans for minor problems and solves them before they become bigger problems. The checkup also needs point to be done, but not as many points as #2. The checkup reduces the number of repairs needed.

When starting the game. Players begin with a certain amount of allowance. Marship sets different prices for different rockets, fuel, and supplies such as food, oxygen, tools, medicine, etc. But later in the game players can trade or share resources with crew members based on needs.

Red - direction. White line - path. Yellow dot - you. White dots - asteroids. Players can see their progress from here. The map keeps on changing as players advances into deep space. There is a mini map on the top right. When clicking on it, the map fills out the whole screen. The system that the map uses is SSPS (Solar System Positioning System). Marship offers a mini-game that maps out the constellations. On the screen players can discover many stars. Players can draw fun shapes with the stars of their choice.

The diagram above shows an example of what the game does when a crew mate gets a disease. When the computer randomly generates a problem, the player can hover over the notification, and learn in more details of this disease. The player can choose different ways to help his crewmate. If the player answers the question correctly, then he gets more points and heals a crewmate. There is also a link showing how to get more information about the disease if the player is curious. 

Severe medical issues may include:

1. Blood Clots
2. Damage immune systems
3. Damage learning
4. Shorten memory
5. Damage the spleen (a body part)
6. Bone loss
7. B cell reduction
8. Radiation can hurt brain cells
9. Damage mental action

Here is an illustration of how players can choose their own rocket type. Each rocket has its unique characteristics, cost, and physical limits. For example, if the player picks the Cosmic Cruiser, then the player has a large cargo hold (which means more oxygen, food, etc.) but the downside is that the travel speed is slower.

Players can also choose their own paths. Some paths are the fastest, but the most dangerous. Some paths are the most scenic with views of the moon and Mars, and players can take photos and sell them for more points. Some are the slowest, but the safest. Players can play the “Dodge the Asteroids” mini-game if they choose the fastest or the most scenic path. In this mini-game, players should avoid the asteroids as they can hit and damage the rocket ship.

When choosing the risky way, the player has to play “Dodge the Asteroids!”. This is a game where the player moves the rocket ship up and down using the arrow keys to try and avoid the flying asteroids. If the rocket ship makes the finish without taking damage, then the player gets to move on. But it crashes and explodes, then sadly the player will need to restart.

This is what happens when the rocket crashes into an asteroid.

If the player chooses the Scenic Path, then the player has to play the “Capture the Picture” mini-game. In this mini-game, players try to capture as many asteroids in a picture as they can. They get 3 shots. For every asteroid they take, they get 5 points.

Players can choose their own avatar! Each avatar has its own status. For example, if a player chooses the doctor role, then the player has a lot of money to start with but, in the end may earn less points for choosing that role because surviving would be easier when the player can afford more resources. But if the player chooses the farmer role, the player starts with less money but in the end the player gets more points as an award for doing it in a more challenging way.

After a player chooses the crew, type of rocket, and the desired path, Marship automatically generates a series of unexpected events for the player to experience different challenges of travelling in deep space. 

As players experience different dangers, they learn how to overcome them and successfully land on Mars. They will be rewarded by playing a mini-game which we uniquely designed for successful landers. The mini-game is called “Grab Those Rocks!”.

The mini-game allows them to control the rover to get the rocks on Mars and bring it back to their spaceship! This is a fun game for younger kids.

After the mini-game, a player can choose to stay on Mars or return to Earth. If they choose to stay on Mars, they can not sell the rocks they have collected for points, but they can trade them for supplies to live on Mars and they gain a higher status for playing our future game of Marship 2. If the player chooses to go back to Earth, Marship can provide a quick animation of them going back to Earth without any challenges this time. Furthermore they can sell the rock they collect on Mars for points. 

At the end of the game, the total game points a player has is compared against all other player’s points. This is how players get their ranks.

Marship encourages players to play multiple rounds to explore different possibilities of space travel and improve their ranks through continuous learning.

Marship 2 will be a sequel game to Marship 1 in which the players can claim citizenship on Mars and build their own communities. They will need to overcome exposome of living on Mars. The joy and challenges continue!

We used most of the sources from NASA as well as many other sources on the internet and science reading material. We listed the links in the Reference section below. We learned many aspects about how the body reacts to living in space for long periods of time.

Our team is made up of 3 boys from 3 different states in the USA. 

Brandon Du is 11 years old and a 6th grader at the Harker School in San Jose, California. He loves math and reading. HIs favorite book is George's Secret Key to the Universe by Stephen Hawking. He also loves designing airplanes since he was very young. Brandon wants to work at NASA when he grows up.

Brian Wang is 10 years old and in 5th grade at Dufief Elementary School in Maryland. He likes drawing and math. He also likes to read Warriors and his favorite movie is Captain Underpants. Brian’s favorite place to go is Ocean City and he would like to go on an airplane since he hasn't in a very long time.

Lee O’Connor is currently 12 and goes to Tomahawk Creek Middle School. He lives in Chesterfield, Virginia. His favorite hobby is looking at the stars through a telescope. He also likes to ride bicycles on nearby trails. His favorite subject is Science.

Even though we have never met in person, we share our love for space exploration and enjoy working together on the internet. We learned many things such as coding, editing, game theory, and storytelling. For the NASA Space Apps Challenge, we explored different ideas and decided to build a creative game as it is the most effective way to educate kids of any age and any language background. Even though there are a lot of games about space in general, we feel there is no good game to teach kids about the challenges of space travel. So we decided to do it ourselves.

The hardest challenge that we faced in building Marship was virtual communicating. Another problem we had to overcome was lagging on the internet. We experienced file loss and download issues. We prefer working in person because we get to interact and it is more fun and efficient. We worked together through Zoom. We used Zoom even though we had technical difficulties, but we never gave up. For our chatting we used google hangouts to talk about work if we weren’t in a meeting. We worked together section by section and little by little. It was sometimes a bit overwhelming but the overall experience was extremely rewarding.

For this project we used: scratch.mit.edu , wevideo.com , NASA's GeneLab, and the NASA resource tab for Trail to Mars (https://2021.spaceappschallenge.org/challenges/statements/the-trail-to-mars-can-you-keep-your-crew-alive/resources). We used pixelartmaker.com for the drawings. We would like to thank Matt, who helped us understand what to do and how to get ourselves prepared for the challenge. We used these websites:

•  The 12 Greatest Challenges for Space Exploration 
• Challenges of space exploration
•  Space Technology Grand Challenges 
• Technology challenges of deep space
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41526-020-00124-6
• Health risks on the way to Mars
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_spaceflight_on_the_human_body
• Impact of space flight on the human body
• Every challenge astronauts will face on a flight to Mars
• Fuel management
• https://www.mars-one.com/mission/risks-and-challenges 
• Risks of deep space
• https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphy.2020.00362/full  
• About Radiation
• https://earthsky.org/space/human-health-dangers-mars-travel/ 
• Mental Stress
• https://now.northropgrumman.com/mars-exploration-3-problems-science-needs-to-solve-first/  
• Not enough water
• https://sciencenode.org/feature/space-radiation.php
• Research on traveling in space
• https://www.ebr.edu.pl/pub/2006_1_54.pdf 
• What could go wrong in a liftoff
• https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/astronauts/space-medicine/radiation.asp 
• Effects of Radiation
• https://sciencing.com/different-kinds-rockets-8552176.html
• Types of rockets

#Mars, #Games, #Loveforspace, #NASA, #Magikid, #Trailtomars, #Spaceappschallenge, #Minigames, #Marship

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