Astrodition — Adobe X NASA Creative Jam

An app to help kids learn more about NASA's space exploration

Overview

As part of Adobe's 1-week design competition in partnership with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), my teammate and I designed an app called Astrodition, a tablet app for early adolescents to explore space and NASA's robot team.

As Top 10 finalists, my teammate and I were invited to present our work to a virtual audience of 600+ as well as a panel of three judges from Adobe and NASA

We walked away from the competition as 4th Place winners out of 173 submissions.

date
May 2021
role
UX Design
team
Jin-Hong Jung, Leesan Kwok

A world beyond earth

Astrodition is an app that helps children learn more about outer space through interactive games. It focuses on acquainting users with the solar system, equipments, and scientific work involved in the Mars 2020 mission. Our solution utilizes animated transitions and a consistent design system to provide a smooth learning experience for users.

What do early adolescents prioritize?

In order to dive deeper into what kind of activities our users learn best from, we interviewed Dr. Emily Cardarelli, a scientist at NASA JPL currently working on the Mars 2020 mission. Dr. Emily gave us insights as to what she considers are important topics to cover from the mission and we designed activities based on those insights.

From our brief research, we dove into creating a sitemap that visualizes the architecture of our app. We dissected missions into 3 different groups, each containing checkpoints that users will need to complete. Due to our limited scope of work, we focused on two activities that would best engage our young users.

Starting your mission on mars

One mission included four different checkpoints. Instead of blandly listing out checkpoints, we utilized the illustration from Mars 2020 to create a road map that users will have to complete. There were many opportunities to gamify elements within the app, and the mission page was one of them.

Choosing your mission

Rovers received large attention in preparation of the Mars 2020 mission. They were designed to explore the land and collect minerals for farther research. To model the actual mission happening on Mars, users were given the option to choose which rover they can build, in order to move on to the next mission, which is to discover rocks.

Build your rover

Once users onboard onto their first game within a mission, they will be asked to drag and drop parts of the body onto corresponding areas. Users are then provided with a description of the functions of various apparatuses to learn how they contribute to the objective of Mars 2020.

Discover rocks

In discover rocks, users are challenged to differentiate landscapes of Earth and Mars. We found that many landscapes within Mars look remarkably similar to those of Earth's. Having users try to differentiate between the two planets teaches them why scientists envisions signs of life on Mars.

Outcomes

As mentioned, Astrodition made it to the top 10 finalists and our group was invited to present our work to a virtual audience of 600+.

Although we proudly placed 4th from the entire competition, there are still some aspects that I want to explore farther.

💬

More user research

If time allowed, I would have conducted interviews or surveys on young adolescents too discover what really engages them to learn.

🔨

Build a design system

I would also build a comprehensive design system for more consistency across different pages and activities.

🤔

Challenge users

Knowing that users were 11-13 years old, I would have designed our missions to be more intellectually challenging than what we designed. Though early adolescent years feel far beyond my age, it was important to understand that they are capable of forming their own ideas and questions.

© 2022 Jin-Hong Jung