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Aspiring astronomic explorers have competed in a virtual space applications competition hosted by the kingdom’s National Space Science Agency (NSSA) in collaboration with NASA, kicking off International Space Week.
The hackathon, which was first held in Bahrain last year, aims to encourage students to build solutions that use NASA data to address the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and foster sustainable development worldwide.
Two teams of high school and university students, aged 14 to 19, competed this year creating solutions to increase awareness of sustainable actions to preserve the planet.
One of the judges, Dr Hanan Albuflasa, assistant professor in University of Bahrain’s (UOB) Department of Physics, said: “The hackathon gives students 48 hours to come up with a solution. Given the short time frame, the focus is on solutions that utilise NASA’s data and are easy to deploy.”
Dr Abdulmonem Alshino, assistant professor at UOB’s College of Science, was the other judge for the competition.
Of the two teams, the Plant-It team, comprised of Kawthar Hatem AlKooheji, Amna Mohammed and Minhaj ul Jannat took the top prize.
The women created an app that encourages students around the world to plant and nurture their own plants, while educating them about the environment.
The other team, calling themselves Chicken Tikka in honour of the food they are most likely to miss on a space mission, included Nawaf Nazeer, Mohammed Rihal, Hriday Grover and Steven Kolady.
The team developed two applications – one which maps seismic activity around the planet and a single-players asteroid attack game.
Latifa Al-Khalifa, co-founder of Clever Play, which is helping organise all of NSSA’s activities during the International Space Week, said: “We’d like to thank the judges and participants for joining us. We had participants from schools across Bahrain, as well as UOB. We also had two participants who joined us from Institute of Information Technology, Lucknow and Joseph’s College, Bangalore in India.”
The hackathon is the first of a slew of activities launched to celebrate International Space Week, all done virtually on Zoom.
On Sunday night, the agency conducted an activity for children to learn about the phases of the moon.
Last night, Canadian astronaut-candidate and aquanaut Dr Shawna Pandya delivered a talk discussing some of her adventures exploring space and science.
Tonight, at 6pm, children and parents can join an Arabic space story-telling session.
Tomorrow at 4pm, children aged 6 to 10 years old can participate in a DIY activity involving the solar system. On Friday, at 6pm, experiments will be broadcast live to inspire aspiring scientists.
The week will wrap up with a reading of Look Up! on Saturday at 5pm.
