#diamondplanet

What an amazing weekend!

Here in Glasgow we had 25 people sign up, and then a few people drop out before the day so that we had just 22 signups as we opened the doors Saturday morning. In the end we had 20 people actually show up to participate, not including the judges, the kids and their families. 

The Main Projects

We had teams working on 8 different projects at our location, plus 1 project in Panama!

Cupola Rider The top prize at our location, and the first to be sent up for international judging, this team developed a web application and a mobile app to allow people to see the world from the perspective of the ISS. The application not only tells you when the ISS will be overhead, it shows you what you could see if you were on the ISS right now. See a working demo of this app on Windows or Mac machines at http://www.martianapp.com/CupolaRider/earth/

The Great Explorer Developed a fantastic educational video about the Voyager space probe. This is one of the projects that we sent up for International Judging. See the video here: http://www.geeksoc.org/~wnelson/events/2013-04-20-ISAC-GLASGOW/2013-04-21%20-%20Voyager%20-%20The%20Great%20Explorer.mp4

Storm  A tribute to Storm Thorgerson, the designer of the Pink Floyd album cover 'Dark Side of the Moon' who passed away recently. Using NASA images of the dark side of the moon, a brooch was created in the style of the famous album cover. View the result here: http://www.calummorrell.com/Clients/SpaceAppsGlasgowSelected/content/IMG_0137_large.html 

COMH -- Curiosity Orienteering Map Hunt  took the location data from the rover and mapped that to a real map on the earth to print out Orienteering directions for kids to use to learn how Orienteering works. One team member tested the project by taking the data from the program out to a local park and Orienteering the challenge. He came back soaking wet but enthusiastic to finish working on the project with the rest of the team.

ksc2013 Starting from designs on paper, this team created a design for a future version of the Kennedy Space Center using Minecraft.

The Dark Side of the Moon - Craft This project used the same images from the Dark Side of the Moon that were used in the Storm project, and imported them into Minecraft. A player can then explore the moonscape in the game.

Bob is not your uncle today, but rather an application to model air traffic and find better routes during weather problems, disasters or other occurences that throw the system into disarray.

Starmaker is a beaded bracelet in the shape of the constellation of Cancer, with special beads representing planets and stars and a large bead to represent the Diamond Planet.

     In cooperation with Panama:

Brainly Our graphic designer Linsey Tierney helped this crew with graphics for their mobile app to connect girls with women in STEAM careers.

One of our judges, Kate Farrell, got very excited about the In The Sky With Diamonds project and immediately headed out to the shops to bring back beads and other supplies. She didn't enter her project since she was a judge, but she did take the time to create a fantastic necklace with a binary representation of the name of the Diamond Planet, information about its annual cycle, and the date of her own 18,000th birthday, which happens to be coming up soon! I wish I had a picture of it to show you, because it was completely awesome. Geeky crafting for the win!

The Youth Contingent

We had 5 youth participants (not included on the main website), 1 teacher chaperon, 6 parents and 2 non-participant siblings who showed up on Sunday for the presentation phase.

For three days during the week before the event, we (Paul and Lisha) visited Craigbank Primary School in Larkhall to work with children from the P7 class on the Why We Explore challenge. The kids produced a Prezi which you can view at http://bit.ly/craigbank-spaceapps. The kids also wrote their own scripts for their in-person presentation, which they memorized. A low-quality video of their presentation is up at http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/31774263 and a high quality video will be available on YouTube at some point in the not-too-distant future. (Thanks to the awesome work of John Ferguson, aka @jafwords, a secondary school science teacher and founder of Rampant Film Productions.)

The kids arrived at 3pm on Sunday to see the other projects. I saw one kid helping Lynsey Tierney on Illustrator, and several other children working on jewelry at the In The Sky With Diamonds table. Everyone was impressed with Dougie Kinnear's 3D printer and several people sat watching it hypnotically for a while. 

Huge Thanks

We'd like to send out massive thanks to the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) for putting forward the major funding to make this happen. Also, the Met Office for the goodies they sent, Catapult for the T-shirts, GitHub for more great prizes, Strathclyde's GeekSoc for the location and all they did especially in the last few days before the event and during the event, to NASA for their organizational awesomeness, and to Willow at GWOB for her mentorship and support to make this all work. Thanks also go to Calum Morrell for his photography and John Ferguson for photos and video.