A browser based learning platform that teaches NASA's PACE mission to school students, built for the NASA International Space Apps Challenge 2024, challenge PACE in the Classroom.
Built over the hackathon weekend, 5 to 6 October 2024, by Team Q.u.a.s.a.r.
PACE studies Plankton, Aerosols, Clouds and ocean Ecosystems. Those four things are one connected system, and that connection is the thing a static explainer page fails to teach.
So the platform does not explain the four topics separately. It follows a single piece of dust from a field, into the sky, across the planet, and down into the ocean, and lets the learner discover that the four subjects are the same story told at four scales.
Everything else in the platform hangs off that spine. The globe lets you go looking, the quiz checks whether the story landed, and the dashboard keeps score.
The centrepiece, a three minute animated narrative built in PowerPoint.
It opens in second person. You are lying on the grass watching clouds go by. The breeze lifts dust off the ground and carries it upward, and you start wondering where that dust is going.
You follow it up. A guide character explains that it is the clouds' helper, that water droplets gather around aerosols to form clouds, and that clouds cool the Earth by reflecting sunlight. Then the view pulls back to the whole planet, with PACE in orbit scanning continuously.
Then it goes down, through the surface, past the fish, to the phytoplankton, who ask the learner for help understanding their own ecosystem.
Aerosol, cloud, ocean, plankton. One journey, four subjects, in the order the physical system actually connects them.
| Page | What it does |
|---|---|
index.html |
PACE HUB landing, with links out to the official mission site |
signup.html |
Account creation and sign in |
Intro.html |
Mission introduction |
storymode.html |
The three minute animated story |
EarthPACE.html |
Student Exploration Hub, an interactive 3D globe |
quiz.html |
Phytoplankton quiz, 13 questions, Quizizz style |
student-dashboard.html |
Score, resources, events, news, reset progress |
profile.html, settings.html |
Profile and preferences |
The globe is three.js r134 with GLTFLoader, rendering models/earth.glb.
Five ocean regions are selectable, Arctic, Atlantic, Indian, Pacific and
Southern, each with its own content.
| Model | Where it lives |
|---|---|
| The PACE satellite | open in Tinkercad |
| Earth, used by the exploration hub | models/earth.glb in this repo |
The satellite was modelled in Tinkercad on 26 September 2024, nine days before the hackathon weekend, and last edited on 2 October. It is a basic massing model of the real PACE spacecraft rather than an engineering model.
Solar array, spacecraft bus, the large instrument aperture and the sensor cluster on the far face. Recorded from the live Tinkercad model.
Static site, no build step. Serve the folder over HTTP rather than opening the
files directly, because the GLTFLoader fetch for models/earth.glb will be
blocked by the browser on file://.
python -m http.server 8000Then open http://localhost:8000.
The two video files are not in this repository. story.mp4 and earth.mp4
are attached to the latest release. Download them into
images/ and storymode.html and Intro.html will play them. Without them
those two pages load but the video panels stay empty.
This repo was 155 MB for a static site with about 7 MB of real assets.
story.mp4 at 105 MB and earth.mp4 at 24 MB were committed, then deleted from
the working tree in a later commit. Deleting a file does not remove it from
history, so both were still being cloned by anyone who touched the repo. Part way
through, Git LFS was added to catch paceintro.mp4, which does not fix anything
already committed either.
History has been rewritten to strip every .mp4 blob. The repo is now 43 MB,
and .gitignore blocks video so it cannot happen again. Commit dates and
authorship are unchanged, and the four commits that only added or removed video
no longer exist.
The remaining weight is models/earth.glb at 24 MB, plus one earlier 22 MB
version of it in history. That one is a real asset the globe depends on, so it
stays.
This is hackathon code from a two day event and it is published as it was written, not tidied up afterwards.
The clearest artefact of that is in signscript.js, where an Express
app.post('/signup') handler sits at the bottom of a browser side script, under
a comment noting it is a reminder rather than frontend code. There is no backend
deployed, so account creation does not persist. The client side validation and
flow do work.
Team Q.u.a.s.a.r
Aditya Bhaty · Aditya Naidu · Nehal Mishra · Ananya Jain · Chirag Pithadia · Nishita Dubey
Six people, one weekend. Individual task splits were not recorded at the time and are not reconstructed here rather than guessed at. The commits in this repository were pushed from a single account, so the git history is not a record of who wrote what.
My own contribution includes the PowerPoint story animation described above.
| Demo video | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOUNz0Oa6RA |
| NASA PACE mission | https://pace.oceansciences.org |
| Space Apps Challenge | NASA International Space Apps Challenge 2024 |
Participation certificate, Galactic Problem Solver, issued 6 October 2024 and signed by Dr. Keith Gaddis, Program Scientist.
The story animation and the platform were made by the team. Some background media used inside the site, including the Earth intro sequence shown above, is stock footage and belongs to its respective owners.