Inspiration
With a great interest of space and the historic space races we set out to provide an interactive, educational and entertaining application. One which reflects the current attitudes of space exploration, with commercial space companies at the forefront of media attention.
What it does
"theSpacebook" is an interactive educational web app with a strong space theme. Visitors to the site are greeted by sound clips of real space launches. They have the ability to choose between two giants of commercial space travel: Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin. Once they have chosen a side, players can watch their rocket launch and begin their very own space race. The race will consist of a trivia-style game in which their existing knowledge of space is put to the test, with many common misconceptions arising to throw a player off.
How I built it
We built a simple static website using html, css, and javascript. The website is hosted on Netlify. We used velocity.js for animations and Bootstrap for laying elements out.
Challenges I ran into
With limited time to create this project it was a struggle to develop graphics which can reflect the vast beauty of the space above us and develop challenging and educational content for the user. In order to combat this, we split our team into sections based on our strengths and worked individually with regular meeting to ensure we stayed on track.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
As a team we are proud of our ability to work efficiently. A shared interest in the prospect of space expansion allowed every member to work passionately and utilise our skills. We were able to separate and work individually, with areas devoted to mini-games, educational content, graphic design and the overall functionality of the website. All while trusting that we were working towards a shared goal.
What I learned
We initially had a vast range of ideas and wanted to expand our space race throughout the solar system. However, with the limited amount of time we had, we were unable to meet all our initial ambitions. While proud of the work accomplished, we have learned to be more realistic when allocating time to work on seemingly simple areas and how to work best to one's strengths in a time sensitive situation.
What's next for theSpacebook
Our web app has a lot of potential. The format we have set up allows us to add more mini-games in order to lengthen the experience of our users. Furthermore, we aim to develop the sense of competition between the two companies. Beginning with an AI opponent our players can battle and expanding further into a multi-player option.
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