Orbit | Devpost

Inspiration 💡💡

Physics is always the cause of headaches in class for many of us. What if there is an interactive way to start learning at an early age? Our team was inspired by Phet https://phet.colorado.edu/, a website that has physics and chemistry simulation videos for high school students to understand the concepts better. We were interested in building a version for children and just have fun for the weekend on building something that requires a bit of math.

What it does 🙋‍♂️🙋‍♀️

Allows students to have interactive learning. The users just need to tap on the phone to create a new planet in the galaxy that would interact with each other's gravitational field.

How we built it 🔧🔨

We used Expo and React Native to build it, using JavaScript for game logic. We used react-native-game-engine to display graphics.

Challenges we ran into 🚴‍♀️🚳

Creating a model where planets would orbit each other and not just crash into each other was a bit tricky, but this does model the real world in a way. As well, we originally wanted to create scale models of existing orbital systems (e.g. the Moon orbiting the Earth), but quickly realized that the amount of empty space in between them is too large to create a practical scale model.

Accomplishments that we're proud of 🏅

We got the animation to work! We can have one planet orbiting around the other. We implemented our own math for orbiting the planet instead of using APIs at this hackathon.

What we learned 📚

Many of us were not already familiar with React Native and learned how to use it during this project. Also, we learned a lot about orbital physics making this!