An iPhone Game with GOES-R Insight

Our team developed a game, "Satellite Insight," for iPhone, iPod, or iPad. The game highlights the environmental and weather data-gathering potential of the next generation GOES-R satellite. We aimed to create a game that would have educational value, feature a real NOAA mission, and increase awareness of the GOES satellites and especially of the societal benefits deriving from this next generation of technology. We also wanted to reach a different, broader audience of a wider age range than we normally target with our NASA (spaceplace.nasa.gov) and NOAA (scijinks.gov) websites for kids. Oh . . . and we wanted the game to be fun. Although we had developed many fun and educational Flash games hosted on our Space Place and SciJinks Weather Laboratory websites for kids, developing an iOS game presented some different challenges: (1) players are usually interested in playing only very short games, under two minutes; (2) we wanted the game to appeal to a range of ages; and (3) the small touch screen requires a totally different type of interface design. The game is about gathering and storing different types of data collected by GOES-R, with the data rate increasing rapidly while you try to keep up. Six different types (colors, with different symbols) of tiles drop down from the top of a grid and collect in the columns. Touch any block that is in a group of three or more like blocks, then touch the GOES-R satellite icon below the grid to "save" the data and clear the selected blocks off the grid. If more than two columns completely fill up, the game is over. The "data rate" speeds up quickly, making it more challenging to keep the grid from overflowing. "Power-up" symbols appear periodically, which, when touched, do helpful things, such as clear out your tallest column. Players try to beat their own best "survival" time. The first lesson we learned in developing this game was to make sure the game play concept was simple and feasible to implement. Our first idea, in which the player combined raw data types to create processed GOES-R data products, turned out to require human invention of each and every game scenario. It would have been way too labor intensive to create enough of them to keep the game interesting. The second lesson we learned was the need to simplify the science. We had to come up with a much simplified set of data to represent the numerous and sophisticated data types collected by GOES-R's six major instruments. The third lesson was that the interface must take into account that the user's two thumbs cover about 25% of the screen, thus elements must placed and spaced accordingly. And the fourth lesson was that game behavior may need to be modified or enhanced (with "power-ups" and rate adjustments, for example) to make the game fun.