Table 22 - LaunchPad

Graphic poster introducing our game

Inspiration and About our app

We first drew inspiration from the engineering and intricacies required for the functioning of the rocket itself - so many various parts and functions came together to propel the rocket into liftoff. The theme, empowering Women in Tech and particularly the role of Katherine Johnson as a prominent mathematician in NASA's Moon missions demonstrated to us the importance of collaboration and combined ideation in technology and hence we decided to code Launchpad, a game in which players complete different mini-games to work together, use various skills and finally fuel the rocket to liftoff. We saw from our initial research how children in particular were exposed to such large amounts of information on the internet about space exploration, and this highlighted the need for simplified ways to show how rockets and space exploration worked in general for them. Rockets require interdisciplinary knowledge for their functioning, and this is exactly what inspired our rocket game.

How we built it and challenges we ran into

Our group had diverse backgrounds, and this was both a strength and a challenge. One of us was a law student this was her first time coding, so building a project at this scale under a time constraint was definitely difficult - however, this helped us during the concluding stages where we focused on presentation and pitching. The other two members of our group were CS students however we were all on varying levels with Javascript, meaning we had to spend a lot of time prior to coding utilising tutorials to get familiar with the formats. We essentially split up the mini-games and coded them separately, and then linked it all together in the back-end.

Accomplishments that we're proud of and What we learned

We're quite proud of the variety of games that we were able to code, and we learnt a lot about the technical requirements of javascript itself. We attempted to use p5.js libraries to make our game more engaging, however the time-constraint made it difficult to install and learn how to use all of it. We made sure we were all consistent with the theme however, and discussed well in advance how we could make these simple games easy but still attractive for children, which made us very proud of our project.

What's next for Table 22 - LaunchPad

If we were to have more time and manpower, we would love to expand this project into a functioning application and integrate user profiles to save progress for our players. We'd also add more animations to make it more engaging, and add facts and bite-sized info boxes about the NASA space exploration activities so that children can use this as a learning tool as well.