Each year, NASA’s Space Apps Challenge encourages students, enthusiasts, creatives, and anyone curious about space exploration to gather and build cool projects. In 2023, there were over 60,000 global participants worldwide. This past year, I applied to be a local lead for Space Apps and host it at Kingsborough Community College. To my knowledge, this was the first time the event was hosted at a CUNY campus.

During the event, participants form groups of no more than 6 to work on the 20 challenges provided by NASA. These challenges ask the groups to use data provided by NASA to make games, apps, and other creative tools. Then winners are selected in the local region based on judging criteria provided by the organization. Some of these winners will go on to compete globally against projects from other regions.

Please see a gallery of images below

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Here were the projects that were built at Space Apps Brooklyn:

• BanglaByte – a data visualization of the correlation between wildfire occurrences in the United States and the median household income throughout the country.
• Butterfly Space Rescue – This RPG Storytelling game uses the GLOBE protocol datasets as a resource to allow players to use characters to tell and create stories.
• CISSUS – NASA collected a lot of data about exoplanets, However it remains challenging for general public, school students, and citizen scientists to engage with this information, find it, or analyse it. This one-person team aimed to bridge this gap.
• Debugging the Universe – a machine learning-based solution to address the challenge of detecting seismic events across the solar system
• H2O KBCC – Chronicles of Exoplanet Exploration, an interactive educational tool designed to make learning about exoplanets engaging and accessible.
• Poject Prithvi – a chemosynthetic community,it addresses the challenge as it showcases the possibility and discoveries of different forms of life creating food from inorganic compounds
• Team Singly – an ocean world where chemosynthesis, not photosynthesis, sustains life.
• Young Scholars – a game that considers that things can go very wrong in space, from breaking important objects to fixing parts of the ship