By Max Osborn and Aaliyah Thorne
To the editor,
Recently, the 2023-2024 computer science class at Cordova High School has been working on the NASA App Development Challenge (ADC). The NASA ADC is a challenge where we attempt to navigate a rover around the rough lunar terrain in Unity along a path of communication towers.
During our time in this class, we have learned a lot about 3D modeling, teamwork, and more about video editing. However, there have been some challenges as well.
Some challenges we faced during this project included finding out that the map of the moon provided by NASA is not the same size for Unreal Engine as it is for Unity. This forced us to delete everything and switch game engines mid-project. Another challenge we encountered was importing footage to our video editing software, only to find out that the footage only took up the center of the screen. We fixed this issue by changing the resolution settings of the video.
To contrast, some successes we have had are that we figured out how to use Unity much better. We also learned how to communicate with our team better and learned how to take all ideas into account. One example of how we learned to communicate with our teams better is how at the beginning of the challenge we could not agree on a lot of things, like who should do what. Now, we can all easily agree on roles, responsibilities, and more.
Lastly, some things we look forward to are showing the younger grades what we have come up with so far, which will be happening at the time of press.
Max Osborn and Aaliyah Thorne are students at Cordova High School.
