My Lovely Planetarium

ABOUT

My Lovely Planetarium was inspired by our childhood fascination with outer space. As children, we would gaze at the stars and want to learn about their nature and the science behind them. Our model is an interactive website to offer young, curious minds an opportunity to tap into their imagination and explore the stars and constellations, connecting various aspects of science and mythology.

With our model, you can explore the vast Northern Hemisphere! By hovering over each constellation, you can read about the stories of mythology from many different cultures. Students can even draw their own constellations and write stories about their history. Interactive learning is crucial for academic development, so we offer a foundation for students who wish to pursue the sciences to learn astronomy in a fun and exciting way.

THEME

My Planetarium was created to represent Art in Technology. We wanted to show how technology can be facilitated with the use of art to promote interactive methods of education for younger generations. Incorporating elements of creativity with knowledge of CS and technology can be used for improving academics.

HOW WE MADE IT

We used HTML for the structures of our website pages, CSS for the design elements such as glowing and pulsing text, and JavaScript for the interactive features. For the creating constellations section, we first made a canvas and used JavaScript to track the coordinates of the mouse on the canvas. When you press it saves it as a point and when you press more times it draws a line between those points. Using CSS, we changed the font, added text effects, and made our website look cute! We aimed for accessibility by making high-contrast text. We have a navigation bar to switch pages and buttons to access each element easily.

CHALLENGES

Challenges that we ran into were some of our JavaScript code not working. Also, in our original model, users would be able to save their created constellation and story as a .png file, but due to time restrictions, we were not able to do that.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Each member was delegated to a specific task. We focused on our tasks well and learned to collaborate each of our elements into one, cohesive model.

FUTURE

We want to expand My Lovely Planetarium to incorporate more interactive elements to facilitate learning. Content-wise, we hope to include information about the fundamentals of quantum physics and astronomy, adding to our foundation of mythology.