Popkarte

Popkarte is a Unity game based around encouraging people to look at the world around them from new perspectives. This is done by allowing users to play a card game that compares data about certain locations around the world.
This project was created in conjunction with the NASA Space Apps Challenge 2019 completing the challenge "1-Up for NASA". For more information on this, please visit here.

Table of Contents

• Deployment
• Project Details
• Future Ideas and Goals
• References

Deployment

In order to deploy this application you will need to have node.js installed. You can get this application from here: [https://nodejs.org/en/]

1. Open a command line, and navigate to the website folder in this repository.
2. Run sudo node router.js
3. Open a browser and visit either localhost or 127.0.0.1

Project Details

Popkarte is a card game that engourages it's players to learn how to observe the world around them. As users play this game, they compare statistics about different locations in order to win. The player with the highest card of the given statistic wins the round. The game is played as a best out of 5.

Future Ideas and Goals

In the future, there are several additional things could be added to expand this game, both in terms of user experience and in educational value.

• Online multiplayer. While this does not improve the educational value of the game, it will significantly improve replayability and help to draw more users into the game.
  
• Add more types of data to be compared. Right now, the game only runs with data about population density. We would like to add the ability to pull data from many different sources, including (but not limited to) tempurature, annual rainfall/snowfall, and other pieces of data. This would encourage users to learn more about the world around them, as well as learn to estimate these values given what they are able to see. We also think this would help create a more competetive environment for players as even low value cards may be valuable in other areas.
  
• Allow users to customize and build their deck. This feature would allow users to pick and choose the cards that they might draw as they are playing the game. In future versions, we think users may have decks with as many as 30 cards in them. This will encourage users to assess different locations as they try to find the optimal cards for every situation.
  
• Add card collection. We are still unsure of exactly how this will play out, but we would like for users to be able to collect additional cards over time. It is possible we would implement this as some type of location based service where you actually have to visit the area in order to collect the cards. We think this would encourage users to become more observant of their surroundings and to be more aware of the characteristics of the environments they are in.
  

References

Developers

• Jada Blankenship
  
• Sam LaGrave
  
• Phil Lane
  
• Nathan Solomon
  

Artist

• Ben Solomon
  

Used Resources

• Center for International Earth Science Information Network - CIESIN - Columbia University. 2018. Gridded Population of the World, Version 4 (GPWv4): Population Density, Revision 11. Palisades, NY: NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC). https://doi.org/10.7927/H49C6VHW. Accessed 19 October 2019.