Allie Long Way Home

Inspiration

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Many kids would say “ASTRONAUT!” But when we look at elementary schools across the US, we see a concerning lack of STEM education, specifically engineering. Most engineering education starts in high school. But if we expect students to continue pursuing their dreams of becoming astronauts and spaceship builders, we have to start as early as elementary.

What it does

“Allie Long Way Home” uses an intuitive gaming system with a story that is suitable for people of all ages. You play as Allie the alien who, after a mysterious incident, is stranded on the moon and wants to make his way back home. Suddenly, he spots a human building her own device to get back to a place called Earth. This is Allie’s ticket home! He just needs to make one of those things for himself! Along the way, players learn about the functions of each part of the rocket. He’s a long way from home, but you can help Allie build a rocket to return to his planet!

How we built it

“Allie Long Way Home” was built in Scratch, a block coding website. As it is our first experience creating a game, the simple language allowed us to visualize the logic behind the coding process. Additionally, we were able to create all of the original characters and objects for the game using Scratch’s built-in features.

Challenges we ran into

While ideation went smoothly, coding did not. We ran into difficulties coding actions that we only wanted to occur once as well as preventing the code from looping endlessly. Overall, Scratch was fairly simple to learn, but it took time adjusting to a website we have never used before.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Given the fast paced environment of the hackathon and being new to coding, we are proud to have created as much of the game as we did. Though we did not complete the entire game, the portion we finished has all of the features we planned for there to be. Our goal was ambitious, but we did not compromise our original vision to make the coding process simpler.

What we learned

What's next for Allie Long Way Home

In the future, we plan to integrate the ability to create different iterations of a rocket and receive feedback on the effectiveness of the parts and materials chosen by the player, further implementing elements of the engineering design process into the game. We hope “Allie Long Way Home” can be a resource used by instructors to make aerospace engineering and STEM fun and approachable for young students!

Built With

• scratch