NASA collects and publishes thousands of data points every month: images of lunar craters, spectrum analysis of far-away stars, rocket telemetry and so on. Now, the space agency wants to create apps that let people do a variety of things with those data, but first it wants to figure out exactly what people would want from NASA apps.
Its solution? NASA, alongside online development competition community TopCoder, has built the "NASA Tournament Lab," a competition-based coding platform that encourages students and educators with a wide range of programming ability to design apps using NASA data for prizes.
NASA believes that by allowing the public to go wild with coding apps around its data, people will create apps that NASA scientists and coders would not have thought up. NASA will then take the best ideas and flesh them out, making them official apps for the public to use to interact with NASA's data in new, interesting and useful ways.
"Instead of just scientists, our audience will be the millions of school age students, their teachers and parents, game designers and general civilians of the world," reads the Tournament Lab's homepage. "We want to deliver this incredible data to users in a way that excites them –- and thus, to help them understand the value and potential of this data."
Two currently running competitions include a challenge geared for students aged 13-18 to develop the "ultimate app" using NASA data (it's open-ended on purpose) and another for teachers to design an app that uses NASA data in the classroom.
Winners of each contest are determined by a NASA board including a former astronaut, scientists and teachers. The winner of the student contest takes home $7,000 and gets to bring a friend to the launch of the Mars Science Laboratory. The winner of the educator's contest earns $7,000 — certainly enough motivation for most casual coders.
Figuring out what the public wants to do with its data isn't NASA's only goal. It also wants to promote STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education by giving high school students more hands-on, pre-college experience with data manipulation and basic coding.
"We're trying to increase the number of future U.S. students going into STEM, specifically into Computer Science education," said Jason Crusan, the NASA lead on the Tournament Lab project.
TopCoder, which began in 2001, is a community of coders and programmers that compete with one another for prizes, prestige and employment opportunities. The platform presents its 400,000-member community with specific coding challenges, offering prizes — and bragging rights — based on speed and accuracy.
The organization works with numerous clients, including NASA, DARPA and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, to organize open innovation contests.
What kind of apps would you code with NASA's data? Let us know in the comments below.
Thumbnail image courtesy of NASA