// A Perth team from Scitech has been selected as one of five teams globally to receive an honourable mention in NASA’s global Space Apps challenge.
Last October, more than 29,000 participants were involved in the annual NASA Space Apps challenge, held at 225 events in 71 countries, producing 2,067 projects (one project per team). The Perth event was held in the basement of FLUX co-working space, in the centre of Perth’s CBD.
“Out of 29,000+ participants and 2,000+ projects this year, I am pleased to announce that [team Scitech] are one of the recipients of an Honorable Mention for Space Apps 2019.” said Matt Scott, the Global Community Manager at the Space Apps Challenge Global Organising Team.
Matt Scott
“For the first time since 2013, the NASA judges for Space Apps have decided to recognize Honorable Mentions. Our judges maintained [the team Scitech] project and the others recognized are among their top picks, and we are proud to celebrate these projects that embody the Space Apps spirit.”
When these five honourable mentions are added to the top six global winners, team Scitech has effectively made it to the top 11 globally, out of more than 2,000 projects.
“This is an amazing effort, and overall, a fantastic outcome for the Perth 2019 Space Apps Challenge,” said Conrad Pires, co-organiser of Perth NASA Space Challenge 2019.
Lisa Fletcher is the leader of the SciTech team.
“The team saw [Space Apps] as a fantastic opportunity to take part in a global event, which played to one of our strengths at Scitech in using new and emerging technology to create innovative experiences,” said Lisa.
“We’re all very passionate here at Scitech about what we do, so it was a chance to get to spend some time together outside of work to tackle a new interesting challenge. We also had Rocio Bona (Director, Planning) from Curtin University join the team as well, so it was a great chance to collaborate with other organisations as well.”
The team chose the 1UPfor NASA Earth challenge, which involved creating a video game using NASA Earth data to inspire, educate or inform players.
You can view the Scitech team’s project page and pitch video here.
“We selected this challenge as we’ve had feedback we’ve conducted with our customers that they are interested in games, or game-like experiences, as well as many staff who love playing games,” said Lisa. “This meant we could take along some of our equipment to experiment with over the weekend.”
“The most exciting thing is that we’re all really keen now to actually bring our prototype to life – we think it has real potential. We [created] an immersive VR game where players rewild endangered ecosystems with the help of NASA data. This is a game for good that can have real impact.”
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More about Space Apps: https://www.spaceappschallenge.org/
All Honorable Mentions can be found at https://www.spaceappschallenge.org/honorable-mentions/.
The six Global Winners can be found at https://2019.spaceappschallenge.org/awards/.
Photos – Supplied.
