High-Level Project Summary
The main goal of our project is to explain the importance of the sun and space missions to the public. While doing this, we especially tried to reach young people who are the future of our world and since social media is the easiest, and the most efficient way to reach young people, we produced content through social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter. We also gave importance to using interactive media tools. Because we believe that giving the opportunity to our young people to contribute to Space missions and to benefit from their creative ideas is the most important thing we should do.
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
UNLOCKING THE SECRETS OF THE SUN
The Sun; reason of the life on the Earth and our biggest energy source. One of the reasons why we want to discover the Sun is if it didn’t exist there wouldn’t a life. And it makes Sun mission more and more important. There are a lot that we don’t know about the Sun but some missions are managed out by NASA. For example, to us, the most important Sun mission: Parker Solar Probe. It is the first device that approaches closest to the Sun. And it collect information about our star. And thanks to Parker Solar Probe, we got a lot of data.
Detection of space free from cosmic dust, structure of the solar wind, irregularity in magnetic field lines, the point where the solar wind changes direction and some information like these are got from PSP. And it shows how much important the Sun missions are.
At this point, we understand people should know Sun missions’ importance. And our challenge exists: UNLOCKING THE SECRETS OF THE SUN. Our aim is to make people are informed about the projects and information about the Sun and the Sun missions. But how? How can we make people are unaware of this subject?
In today’s world, the Internet and social media platforms are a part of our lives. People can reach from one end of the world to the other. And only via their mobile phones! While these platforms have taken such a place in our lives, it was inevitable for us to use them in our project. And firstly, we decided to set up a website.
A website about the Sun, its properties and the Sun missions can help us to reach people. We use information on NASA’s website to write articles for people who wants to get detailed knowledge about the Sun. And we published them. In this way, people can read the articles and make research. We developed our website using WordPress and using Space Apps' free domain service.
The next step we decided to do is organize conferences. This helps us to meet people who are into this subject from all over the world. And we designed a poster to announce the conference. It includes NASA’s projects, the Parker Solar Probe mission and more. And Sun enthusiasts can meet from different countries with an online conference. We shared the poster on our website.
As we said before, social media has a big role in our lives and using it as a tool can help us to contact people. Interactive platforms has always been influential. Getting user’s ideas about future Sun missions helps us to exchange information. In addition, we use social media platforms –Instagram and Twitter- to announce our events, conferences and new articles.
We also want people to have fun while they are learning. At this point we decided to develop a game. Virtual reality based games help people learn easier. It has been scientifically proven that it is beneficial for people to learn while having fun. The game we created offers users an interactive experience. We developed it using Unity and C#. The person playing the game represents the captain of the first manned mission to the Sun. While getting knowledge, he / she has fun.
We used the methods we used about the importance of researching the Sun and the Sun missions to reach every people. It is not possible for us to appeal to all age groups with a single tool. So we used social media and the virtual reality based game to get especially young people’s attention. And with the articles that we published on our website we appealed to all people who is into space and the Sun. We also wanted to bring people from all around the world together with an online conference -on Zoom video conferencing platform-.
With all these tools and our project, we would like to announce the importance of the space explorations and the Sun missions. We aim to achieve this by using platforms and applications that are popular in today's world.
We developed a website and a game, we also created 2 social media accounts to share information about the sun.
We used WordPress to develop our website, Unity to develop our game, Instagram and Twitter as social media platforms.
We programmed the game using Unity C#
We used NASA’s resources while doing our research.
Space Agency Data
What Space Agency Data We Used
NASA, how we used it:
Understand PSP's aim and purpose
To fully understand PSP's mission ->This inspired us a lot while we were working on the project and was the reason behind us developing a game.
Get information about PSP's structure
Get a grip of Sun and Sun's features ->We also got inspired by these information and decided to write articles about it on our website.
Learn about more space crafts that explored/are exploring/are gonna explore Sun.
2. ESA (European Space Agency) , how we used it:
Get more information about Sun, it's structure and it's affects
Learn about Solar Orbiter
3. CSA (Canadian Space Agency), how we used it
Learn deeply about how Sun impacts our daily lives
4. JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), how we used it:
Learn about Solar Physics Satellite "HINODE" ->We saw a lot of pictures HINODE took (ex.) while we were researching about it and we were fascinated by them. Which made us want to look further more into the topic.
Hackathon Journey
We participated in this competition to make a difference. Our team did not receive any support from a mentor teacher or from school teachers. We tried to handle homework and school activities individually, and sometimes to move forward by helping each other in difficult times. With our love of space and our investigative spirits, we were able to continue despite the hard times and developed this project.
Inspired from ourselves and the data we collected from around us contributed a lot and so we tried creating an infrastructure so that everyone can understand this project, as well as the new generation children.
The reason we chose this challenge was to be able to help as many people as we can, making them aware of today’s technological developments and the mysteries our space is hiding. We wanted to be able to develop a more curious, creative and enthusiastic society that is ready to make a substructure to future generations.
This 2-days of process was relevant for our purpose. Although we faced challenges, this Space Apps program has been a very innovative and instructive journey for our team. We feel advanced not only socially but also academically. We feel that we have progressed in areas related to strengthening our ability to work with the team, gaining different perspectives, better understanding of the depths and mysteries of space, and the process of working on a project, which is very important at current times, and we are thinking of doing much better works by taking these experiences into account in our future works.
We hoped that there would be someone from our school to thank, but as our team, we would like to thank the Space Apps team, who supported us the most until the end and opened a new horizon for us, and our valuable mentors and assistant mentors who worked very hard for us. We would like to state that we cannot repay their support during these challenging times.
References
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/nasa-prepares-to-launch-parker-solar-probe-a-mission-to-touch-the-sun
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/nasa-s-parker-solar-probe-is-about-to-lift-off
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/traveling-to-the-sun-why-won-t-parker-solar-probe-melt
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/sun/in-depth/
https://science.nasa.gov/missions-page?field_division_tid=5&field_phase_tid=All
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Solar_Orbiter/Solar_Orbiter_s_first_images_reveal_campfires_on_the_Sun
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Solar_Orbiter
https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/astronomy/northern-lights/what-are-northern-lights.asp
https://global.jaxa.jp/projects/sas/solar_b/
Tags
#code #site #socialmedia #information #Sun #sunmissions #parkersolarprobe
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.