Photo Credit: Winona Post
Winona State University students, faculty and community members joined together to inspire, create and design for NASA’s Spaces Apps Challenge. The challenge is a 48 hour global collaboration event with WSU teams being the only participating location in Minnesota.
One team channeled their creative energy “to create an artistic work to communicate, inform, or inspire others about humanity’s return to the moon,” according to the Winona Post. The team referred to the event as an “idea jam” rather than a hackathon as they worked on an artistic work to inspire a return to the moon, gaining inspiration from planetary geologist and WSU Professor Jennifer Anderson. Anderson received a NASA grant in 2016 to better understand what creates craters in space.
The second team focused on the development of a video game that pulled images from NASA’s database and quizzed players on the images. As they moved through the development process they realized the benefits teamwork can bring to a project like game development. “What I think is really cool and exciting is that a lot of people who don’t normally get to work together get pulled into the same space to be available for each other,” WSU Computer Science Lab Director Eric Wright told Winona Post Reporter Chris Rogers.
To learn more about WSU’s participation in NASA’s Space Apps Challenge visit the Winona Post.