Concept
During the interim (November-December) semester in 2009 at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, I joined "AstroFest", a 5-credit class dedicated to creating and developing concepts for Kalpaneya Yatre 2010. Kalpaneya Yatre was a 10-day exhibition and festival, held in the November of 2010, celebrating 2009, the international year of astronomy.
I proposed to create an intuitive and tangible interface application as a permanent exhibit to be placed in the Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium, in the form of a kiosk. This pedagogic application aimed at encouraging young children to create their own stars, based on scientific facts, thus, learning about stars along the way. Stars interact with each other during the entire lifecycle, which is a sped-up version of their actual life cycle (and therefore, based on various factors such as the temperature, size and composition), therefore urging children to come back to look after their stars. At the end of a star's lifecycle, children can look for actual stars in the sky to name after their "homegrown" stars. After the exhibition, this application could be distributed amongst schools and educational institutions, to be used as an interactive tool to teach. This video was made to illustrate the hypothetical working of the concept, as proposed to the board.
Star Harvester - concept by Mahima Pushkarna on Vimeo.
I look forward to developing this game as an iOS and Android game as a self-initiated project in the near future.
Mahima Pushkarna