exploring earth and the solar system
TRANSCRIPT
Exploring Earth and the Solar System: Educational Outreach Through NASA’s
Space Place, Climate Kids, and SciJinks Websites
NASA commits educational outreach through its Space Place,
SciJinks and Climate Kids Websites. Each site provides
engaging content to cultivate interest in elementary- and
middle-school-aged children for science and technology.
Background Education through Engagement
Space Place allows students to
explore features of Space including our
Sun, Earth, and other objects in our
Solar System, as well as the
technology and people behind it all.
Climate Kids invites students to see
how changing climate conditions can
affect animals, humans, and the
environment.
At SciJinks students learn how
tornados, thunder and lightning storms
and other weather conditions form, as
well as learn how the GOES-R weather
satellite allows us to learn more about
these conditions.
Solar System Scramble
Butterfrog Mix-Up
Future Work Acknowledgements
This game features scrambled letter tiles
and visual clues for the player to guess the
mystery word. The letter tiles feature both
drag-and-drop capability as well as
keyboard input to place the tiles into the
answer spaces. The letter tiles and the
answer spaces use complimentary arrays
to hold the tiles, as well as to check for
answer validation.
One challenge in the development of this project was proper detection of a letter
tile being dropped by the mouse over an answer space. This problem was
addressed by casting the coordinate positioning of both the letter tile and the
answer space relative to each other on the global coordinate plane.
Another challenge encountered during development was bridging the code for
the game mechanics and the user interface. Two interns worked on each feature
separately with different coding styles. When the code was integrated together,
many features were incompatible and needed to be re-coded.
After a question is answered correctly the
color of the letter tiles in the answers
spaces shade green, and a fun fact
regarding the answer is displayed on
screen. The next question button clears
the screen, compiles the score received
this question with total score, and creates
the next question for display.
This project features three puzzles of
increasing difficulty using a four piece
triangle puzzle, a nine piece square puzzle,
and a fourteen piece hexagon puzzle.
Puzzle pieces can be rotated by click-drag,
or by clicking on a piece to auto-rotate it to
the next available position. Time spent on
each puzzle and number of rotations made
are noted in the sidebar.
The development of this project went much more smoothly than the first. A main
advantage came in the approach; Before any code was written, nearly all
features had been planned and implemented on paper, and many problems that
may have been encountered during implementation were already anticipated
and worked through.
In order to help the player, a hint button
briefly highlights any piece in its correct
position green, and any incorrect position
is highlighted red. This is made possible
by comparing the rotation orientation of a
piece to the original orientation. The
correct position has a rotation of zero.
After a piece has been rotated a check is
made to verify if the puzzle is complete.
This project made heavy use of inheritance and polymorphism. Abstract classes
contained the behavior for pieces and puzzles. This allowed for easy expansion
with more pieces per puzzle, as well as any shape needed. This codebase is
thus both portable and easy to maintain, should future projects require similar
features.
Overview Projects completed
Solar System Scamble is a scrambled
letter-tile guessing game which
provides visual clues to the user for
various objects in our solar system,
from the planets to comets and others.
Butterfrog Mix-up is a rotating-tile
puzzle game and a companion to
articles on the Climate Kids website
describing the damage changing
climate conditions may cause to
delicate ecosystems.
Solar System Scramble and Butterfrog Mix-up were created
using Adobe Flash Professional and coded using
ActionScript 3.
After the completion of Solar System Scramble and Butterfrog
Mix-Up, attention was turned to creating a maze generation
system to be used for future titles. While the first two projects
had concept and artwork done, and merely needed to be
implemented, the groundwork for a future maze project was
created without any prior work to expand upon. A signature to
describe the walls present on each cell in the maze using a
West-South-East-North bit-switch convention system was
created. This signature is written to a simple text file.
ActionScript and Flash handled the graphical creation of the maze itself by reading the signatures
in the accompanied text file, while the generation of the signatures themselves was done
separately by a Python script. Wall collision detection would be simply handled by detecting
intended movement versus a flag indicating a wall was present given current player cell location.
This proved a faster and more reliable detection method than graphical collision detection.
Funding for this project provided by a
grand from the National Science
Foundation to the Math Engineering Science Achievement (MESA)
program at East Los Angeles College. This project also made
possible by the ELAC-JPL partnership, a part of the Minority
Student Programs contingent at Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Special Thanks The Space Place Team: Mentors Nancy Leon and Austin
Fitzpatrick, Diane Fisher, Alex Novati and Laura Lincoln
Jenny Tieu, Amy Dickenson and the rest of JPL Education Office
for organizing incredible tours and excursions at JPL