suSTEMable - Space Apps Challenge

suSTEMable| SDGs and COVID-19

Awards & Nominations

suSTEMable has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Finalist

SDGs and COVID-19

This challenge invites you to analyze the impact of COVID-19 on the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by looking at the current and ongoing change in the monitoring indicators of the UN SDGs using Earth observation/remote sensing and global Earth system model-derived analysis products.

Sustaining A Community Through Crisis

Summary

Our team worked together to create a fun, educational interactive resource to educate teens about what it will take to move our cities towards a more sustainable future. We created a simulation where the user is in charge of a city of 2 million citizens while COVID-19 is beginning to infiltrate it. Every decision has a different set of outcomes and gives the user a set of stats, such as health, economy, and sanitation, with that they must work towards keeping their city happy and healthy!

How We Addressed This Challenge

Our project addresses this prompt because of the way we researched and thought about the impact of COVID-19, as well as our solution, which is aimed to teach even more people about the effects of COVID-19 on the SDGs. Not only did we educate ourselves about how COVID-19 has impacted the progress of the SDGs, but we took it a step further, and decided that we would educate our audience as well. This challenge inspired us to make our city simulation, which directly reflects the impacts of COVID-19 on the city which the user is in charge of by showing them how their city’s stats change. Our project reflects the change in food security, air quality, economics, and more through each prompt, decision, and consequence.

Link to website: https://sustainingacommunity-covid.us/index.html

How We Developed This Project

Our team is a group of high school students who met within a NASA SEES Internship this year. We are all passionate about making our world a more sustainable place, so there was no question as to which prompt we wanted to do. We wanted to focus on showcasing educational materials about the UN’s Sustainable Development Guidelines, and how they were impacted by COVID-19, in a fun and informative way for older kids and teens. We decided to create a website that would be like an interactive "Choose Your Own Adventure" type of game. This game would allow the player to be in control of a city, making choices as to how they would handle COVID- 19. It would then lead them to a page that holds their final score along with links to pages that discuss the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Our first step was to build the website using the NASA-provided basic web design builders through Porkbun and Weebly. Next, we linked buttons to hidden pages to allow the player to have full control in an easy, clean method. As for space agency data, we used the Earth Observatory and Earth Data Sites. We found that our biggest challenge was the fact that we bit off a little more than we could chew and we were slightly worried about time management, given that we all only had basic coding knowledge and none of us were familiar with the web builder. On the other hand, our biggest achievement was creating a successful interactive game with 64 different pathways! We are extremely proud of how much we have accomplished in such a short amount of time. Congrats to everyone who participated this year!

Future Plans:

While our team has enjoyed developing this project over the past two days, we would need more time to significantly modify and improve it. We currently have a series of questions and decisions with over 60 different outcomes and possibilities, but would like to add more. Our team has addressed all of the fundamental factors put into a city’s decision making, however, if we were given more time to cultivate this project, we could dive deeper into possible solutions and analyze even more factors which affect decision making, such as the rate of infection, and the number of people affected. We would also have liked to go into more detail concerning the statistics and data, and maybe even add a few curve balls into the mix such as tornadoes and floods. Finally, if we had a longer timespan to work on this project, our message would be able to reach a greater number of people, which was the ultimate goal of all our work.