Space Apps Challenge 2017

Space Chimps | Dictionary of Earth

Albacete, Castilla-La Mancha

Awards & Nominations

Space Chimps has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Finalist (Most Inspirational)

The Challenge | Dictionary of Earth

Develop a creative way for the public and scientists alike to learn the definitions of Earth-related scientific and technical terms, using the power of crowdsourcing.

SpaceDictionary

SpaceDictionary is a game that aims to ease the learning of scientific terms

Space Chimps

Spacedictionary story

Why this challenge?

We saw this as a challenge with lots of potential to be creative and innovate on a (potentially) useful app to learn and provide people interested in space with a game to play in spare time.

Our team

Our team is composed of three Electronics Engineering students and two Computer Science students.

Working organization

We divided in three different tasks: Android app development, database management and UI designing. Since none of us had ever participated in a hackathon or a similar event, we had to work out our abilities' speed and coordinate ourselves.

Resources

Nearly our only resources of theory were: "The principles of beautiful web design" by Jason Beaird and "Libro 100% Android" by Jarroba.com

Our logo is a modified version of the logo from Space Apps Albacete 2017 using our color palette and the simple images used in some buttons were designed by ourselves.

We also used the following resources from NASA for building our database of scientific concepts,

The result

SpaceDictionary was born after two days of hard (and intensive) work. It features:

  • "Learning mode" to learn new things of different topics.
  • "Practice mode", so you can check how you are doing in the learning mode.
  • "Compete mode" to challenge every other SpaceDictionary user in the world.
  • Submitting new content for the app, which requires our supervision after being suggested by the user.

We took care of every piece of detail since we designed our own Rest API, built a database using MySQL on a Raspberry Pi so our software doesn't rely on proprietary or out of our hands software and hardware.

We also used our design knowledge to create a simple, responsive and intuitive User Interface following basic design principles like the thirds rule, golden ratio and some Fibonacci numbers hidden in the ratio of buttons and images.

Download

Our github for getting our source code is:

https://github.com/lagartoverde/spaceChimps

Thanks in advance for your attention. Hope this script is useful.

Made with ❤️ in Albacete, Spain

NASA Logo

SpaceApps is a NASA incubator innovation program.