My ComoNaut

After looking at the challenges, we thought about how we, as kids, were introduced to the STEM field. We were privileged enough to attend schools where one of their focuses were to give students any sort of experience with the STEM field. However, we recognized that the education we had wasn't necessarily accessible for a lot of students, especially those from areas with less education funding. Thus, we came up with the idea of My CosmoNaut - a free, interactive app for kids to get involved in the STEM field from the comfort of their own homes. My CosmoNaut focuses on three main missions: increase accessibility to STEM education, allow students to foster their creativity, and promote diversity and inclusion. In My CosmoNaut, students are given an avatar and a "base room" that they can customize to their own liking. They are also able to pick lessons that they think they would want to learn, and each lesson comes with its own "Create Your Own Adventure" game. The student is then able to navigate through the game, pick what path they want their character to take, answer challenge questions, and get familiar with these STEM topics. They are awarded points and badges for every milestone they accomplish (10 points per challenge question or a badge for every 100 questions answered), and they can display these badges in their "base room". For students who want supplemental material, there will be a tab for different science/engineering experiments they can do at home, mini lessons on conceptual topics, and more. Teachers are also able to utilize this resource, as they can add their students to a "spaceship" and assign the students videos to watch or game to play. Additionally, every 30 minutes, the student will take a break from the game/lesson and watch a short video on a different country or part of the world. We decided to create a small prototype for the game using HTML. We made an example page with a homepage, character, profile, badges, and a map. We also created a Google Slides with information on the game, as well as examples of some of the power-ups and how the graphics would look. As we started the project, none of us had much experience with app development or game design. Some of us were able to do graphic design, while others were able to plan/design how we wanted the game to function. Since we didn't have a lot of app development experience, we weren't able to create a demo of an My CosmoNaut app, so we used the skills we already had to create a basic demo using HTML. None of us had developed an app before, so we were very proud of the idea we came up with and the design that we wanted to implement. We learned a lot about how to make a proper game, different ways to keep students engaged, and we were able to brush up on our HTML skills through our demo. What's next for My CosmoNaut? Well, we believe we have a strong idea that we could turn into a reality. We want to turn this into our next personal project, so we are planning on doing some online courses on web design to help turn this into a fully developed app.

Built With

• googleslides
• html