Exploring Earth and the Solar System: Educational Outreach Through NASA’s

Space Place, Climate Kids, and SciJinks Websites

NASA commits educational outreach through its Space Place,

SciJinks and Climate Kids Websites. Each site provides

engaging content to cultivate interest in elementary- and

middle-school-aged children for science and technology.

Background Education through Engagement

Space Place allows students to

explore features of Space including our

Sun, Earth, and other objects in our

Solar System, as well as the

technology and people behind it all.

Climate Kids invites students to see

how changing climate conditions can

affect animals, humans, and the

environment.

At SciJinks students learn how

tornados, thunder and lightning storms

and other weather conditions form, as

well as learn how the GOES-R weather

satellite allows us to learn more about

these conditions.

Solar System Scramble

Butterfrog Mix-Up

Future Work Acknowledgements

This game features scrambled letter tiles

and visual clues for the player to guess the

mystery word. The letter tiles feature both

drag-and-drop capability as well as

keyboard input to place the tiles into the

answer spaces. The letter tiles and the

answer spaces use complimentary arrays

to hold the tiles, as well as to check for

answer validation.

One challenge in the development of this project was proper detection of a letter

tile being dropped by the mouse over an answer space. This problem was

addressed by casting the coordinate positioning of both the letter tile and the

answer space relative to each other on the global coordinate plane.

Another challenge encountered during development was bridging the code for

the game mechanics and the user interface. Two interns worked on each feature

separately with different coding styles. When the code was integrated together,

many features were incompatible and needed to be re-coded.

After a question is answered correctly the

color of the letter tiles in the answers

spaces shade green, and a fun fact

regarding the answer is displayed on

screen. The next question button clears

the screen, compiles the score received

this question with total score, and creates

the next question for display.

This project features three puzzles of

increasing difficulty using a four piece

triangle puzzle, a nine piece square puzzle,

and a fourteen piece hexagon puzzle.

Puzzle pieces can be rotated by click-drag,

or by clicking on a piece to auto-rotate it to

the next available position. Time spent on

each puzzle and number of rotations made

are noted in the sidebar.

The development of this project went much more smoothly than the first. A main

advantage came in the approach; Before any code was written, nearly all

features had been planned and implemented on paper, and many problems that

may have been encountered during implementation were already anticipated

and worked through.

In order to help the player, a hint button

briefly highlights any piece in its correct

position green, and any incorrect position

is highlighted red. This is made possible

by comparing the rotation orientation of a

piece to the original orientation. The

correct position has a rotation of zero.

After a piece has been rotated a check is

made to verify if the puzzle is complete.

This project made heavy use of inheritance and polymorphism. Abstract classes

contained the behavior for pieces and puzzles. This allowed for easy expansion

with more pieces per puzzle, as well as any shape needed. This codebase is

thus both portable and easy to maintain, should future projects require similar

features.

Overview Projects completed

Solar System Scamble is a scrambled

letter-tile guessing game which

provides visual clues to the user for

various objects in our solar system,

from the planets to comets and others.

Butterfrog Mix-up is a rotating-tile

puzzle game and a companion to

articles on the Climate Kids website

describing the damage changing

climate conditions may cause to

delicate ecosystems.

Solar System Scramble and Butterfrog Mix-up were created

using Adobe Flash Professional and coded using

ActionScript 3.

After the completion of Solar System Scramble and Butterfrog

Mix-Up, attention was turned to creating a maze generation

system to be used for future titles. While the first two projects

had concept and artwork done, and merely needed to be

implemented, the groundwork for a future maze project was

created without any prior work to expand upon. A signature to

describe the walls present on each cell in the maze using a

West-South-East-North bit-switch convention system was

created. This signature is written to a simple text file.

ActionScript and Flash handled the graphical creation of the maze itself by reading the signatures

in the accompanied text file, while the generation of the signatures themselves was done

separately by a Python script. Wall collision detection would be simply handled by detecting

intended movement versus a flag indicating a wall was present given current player cell location.

This proved a faster and more reliable detection method than graphical collision detection.

Funding for this project provided by a

grand from the National Science

Foundation to the Math Engineering Science Achievement (MESA)

program at East Los Angeles College. This project also made

possible by the ELAC-JPL partnership, a part of the Minority

Student Programs contingent at Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Special Thanks The Space Place Team: Mentors Nancy Leon and Austin

Fitzpatrick, Diane Fisher, Alex Novati and Laura Lincoln

Jenny Tieu, Amy Dickenson and the rest of JPL Education Office

for organizing incredible tours and excursions at JPL