AUA Team Wins First Honorary Prize in the NASA Space Apps Challenge 2016

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YEREVAN, Armenia – American University of Armenia (AUA) undergraduate students won the first honorary prize in the NASA Space Apps Challenge 2016 that took place on April 22nd and 23rd. The competition was held at the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory, organized by X-Tech Creative Studios company (founded by Arman Atoyan). This was the 5th annual international NASA Space Apps Challenge, and this year was the first time it was held in Armenia (http://spaceapps.am/).

The challenge implied developing a game that simulates conditions in an off-Earth located permanent or temporary colony. AUA was represented at the competition-challenge by MARS LIVE project, a team of five undergraduate students: Sergey Hovakimyan, Arman Zakaryan, Hamlet Muradyan, Arman Simonyan and Maria Harutyunyan. The winners were presented with prizes by the technological sponsor of the event, SoftLine Armenia company – Samsung Galaxy S7 և Gear VR virtual reality glasses.

MARS LIVE was awarded the first honorary prize. It is a Map-based game, which simulates colonial life on Mars, where each colony has a set of specific tasks, and complete in order to increase the rating of their colony. Tasks include, but are not limited to, gathering geological data (elevation, coordinates, weather conditions etc.). The MARS LIVE app will soon be published in Google Play StoreMore, more information about the App can be found at: https://2016.spaceappschallenge.org/challenges/mars/simspace/projects/mars-live.

NASA is on a mission to foster innovation around challenges affecting us at home and in space. As one of the world’s largest international annual hackathons, they designed Space Apps for problem solvers. The 48-hour event inspired citizen teamwork for positive changes across every skill level and discipline.

The annual and international NASA Space Apps Challenge invites engineers, coders, makers, artists, and storytellers to connect over mission-related challenges. The growing Space Apps community represents the core of NASA’s Open Innovation Initiative. Together, citizens have developed thousands of open-source solutions, and big ideas are shaped using data visualizations, hardware, code, design and more (https://2016.spaceappschallenge.org/.)