Space Apps Challenge 2018

“Space... the final frontier. These are the stories of the Hubble Space Telescope. Its continuing mission, to explore strange new worlds and to boldly look where no telescope has looked before.”

Overview

Educational game for young children where they can learn about our Solar system. Children assemble real life puzzles and use a companion app with AR (Augmented Reality) and voice recognition capabilities to learn more about each one of its celestial bodies.

The game is comprised by a set of real life (physical) cardboard puzzles and a companion application. The game play includes assembling a puzzle of a specific celestial body (e.g. the sun, or a planet), after the puzzle is assembled we use the application to recognize the image on the puzzle to interact and learn more about that particular celestial body.

Vision

We realize that children's education should be a worldwide concern. Almost (four of them!) all of our team members are fathers, and we believe that technology should have a positive and meaningful role in children's development and that parents should have an active participation in this.

What we want our game to have:

• Connection between the real word and the virtual world;
• Interesting facts about the Solar System, its planets and other celestial bodies;
• Quizzes (in the shape of GUI's (Graphical User Interfaces), but also using text to speech to ask questions and voice recognition to answer);

Resources

• Hubble Space Telescope images;
• Cardboard;
• Unity Engine/Unity Editor;
• Vuphoria Image Recognition Software;
• Speech to Text/Text to Speech/Assistant services;

What we built (Puzzles and App Prototype)

We built real life puzzles in the form of cardboard pieces with Hubble images of several celestial bodies of our Solar System printed on them, for the purpose of the prototype the puzzles are simple and easy to assemble (9 pieces) and are packaged in a neatly arranged box, mimicking a real life board game.

As a companion to the board game we also built a companion application where children can, after successfully assembling the puzzle, recognize the image of the puzzle that they just assembled and interact with it, effectively learning more about that specific celestial body.

Bitbucket URL:

https://bitbucket.org/Amxd/samu_the_robot

Google Drive URLS:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1awD4yfx9MHRxJc_gt5BmpkBfFxZX-IpJ/view?usp=sharing (APK)

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1JamInZDSKK... (APK + Puzzles + Video)