Students of the Prijedor Electrical Engineering School, Iva Dragojević, Dejan Stanojević and Vladan Vukota, won third place in a competition for creating applications about space, organized worldwide by the American space agency NASA, one of which was held at the beginning of the month in Paris.
All three are students in the fourth grade, majoring in information technology technicians, and their team won a special award as the favorite team among the 15 or so teams from France and African countries that participated in the 48-hour hackathon.
Dejan Stanojević said that everyone was amazed that they were such a young team and that they came from this area, because the other participants were employed people or students of higher study cycles, and the only ones were high school students.
They created a “3D” interactive web application “Orbitoscope” in which the solar system is shown with the option to speed up the movements, to show a realistic arrangement of dimensions, a mock-up that is not realistic, but gives a better insight into that arrangement of bodies. There is also a 360-degree camera that gives the possibility to approach the planet, a drop-down menu with basic information and a brief description of the planet.
“We made a display of the accompanying objects around the Earth. That part is the most important. We displayed the three objects using databases and using formulas and plotted the orbits. We made a promotional video explaining what the app does and submitted the work for a global assessment that takes place online and in which it can every participant of these local competitions should participate, regardless of placement,” said Dejan.
He added that one of the parameters was the use of artificial intelligence with citing sources.
“For example, we had never worked in 3JS technology before, which is a “Java Script” library, so we didn’t know which hosting supported it, so we used artificial intelligence to guide us on how to host our application.” , says Dejan.
Vladan Vukota believes that the advantage of “Orbitoscope” is that it is adaptable to the curricula and programs of middle and higher grades of elementary school, that NASA shows the universe in realistic dimensions and that these are huge expanses, and here everything is reduced so that it can be seen more easily.
“Everything is in one place and everything is more visually adaptable for a person to understand. It would take us time to perfect it because there are many small things that need to be refined. The calculator is large, there are large numbers, there is a large amount of data and because of that it works slowly, so it would have to be rearranged in some way, to find a way to show everything and make it work as efficiently as possible,” explained Vladan.
Team leader Iva Dragojević says that the “Orbitoskop” demo version of the application is about 80 percent complete, which she believes could be done in two days, and that, like any application, it is subject to changes and improvements.
“This one might take us seven to 10 days of active work to complete. We had five minutes to present it to the jury. Two programmed, one prepared the speech, presentation and writing of the application for the global evaluation where the works of 10 teams will be selected as this year’s global winners,” explains Iva.
She points out that, apart from the results, it is very useful that they had the opportunity to meet people from the NASA agency, from Berkeley University and from large international startup associations, as well as students and engineers from fields related to the IT sector and space exploration.
The space application competition “NASA Space 2024 Challenge” was held in Paris from October 4 to 7, Srna news agency writes.
