Guardian of space

Inspiration We wanted to turn learning about space and science into something that feels like an adventure rather than a traditional lesson. Guardians of Space · Cosmic Academy combines a space-exploration game with an AI science guide, letting students explore missions while getting contextual explanations and clues. What it does Cosmic Academy is an interactive educational space adventure. Players explore different missions and learn science concepts along the way. The AI guide uses Google Gemini to provide concise, student-friendly explanations and hints. Parallel Search adds fresh web research that can be passed into Gemini when a mission needs additional scientific context. How we built it The project is built as a web application using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Node.js/Express. Google Gemini provides the educational AI experience, while the Parallel Search API retrieves relevant web research. The backend combines the research with the player's current mission context before asking Gemini to generate the final response. Challenges we ran into One of our biggest challenges was connecting multiple AI services while keeping the experience simple for the player. We also had to handle API failures gracefully, keep secrets out of the public repository, and make sure the AI responses remained concise and educational. What we're proud of We're proud that we turned a simple space adventure into an AI-assisted learning experience and successfully integrated both Gemini and Parallel Search into the working application. We also made the project reproducible with environment configuration and kept API credentials out of the public repository. What we learned We learned how to connect AI models to a real application rather than treating AI as a standalone chatbot. We also learned about combining web research with generative AI, designing fallbacks for API failure and preparing a project for public GitHub sharing. What's next for Guardians of Space Next, we'd like to expand the science missions, add more interactive experiments and challenges, improve personalization for different learning levels, and make the AI guide more deeply connected to the player's progress.

Built With

• api
• cloud
• css
• express.js
• gemini
• google
• html
• javascript
• node.js
• parallel
• rest
• search