The SPACE GEO project exactly consists of a fun and educational video game about natural events and the appearance of mineral resources; and how they relate to the development of humanity. Natural events are common occurrences on the Earth's surface and even predictable; Thus, we also find concentrations of metallic and non-metallic mineral resources on that surface. When human development ignores or ignores the spaces that are susceptible to these natural phenomena, then there are losses.

The project presents a video game that works by showing natural spaces that occur in an appropriate way to the natural behavior of the earth's surface and do not affect society. The participant must choose the risk they want to face, this can be: vulcanology (Plan de ordenamiento territirial Latacunga), flooding, forest fires, earthquakes, landslides. Then you must choose the infrastructure you want to build, such as bridges, buildings, homes, crops, national or local parks, tourist areas; If you choose an area the event will immediately be activated and if you chose risk areas (high, medium or low) you lose points or the game, if you chose a safe area then you gain points and continue in the game. The characters of the game are two relevant professionals from the scientific community, a geologist named Marta Ordoñez + with a specialty in micropaleontology, who with her findings contributed to the expansion of oil fields on the coast and east of Ecuador; The other character is Ronnie Antoine Nader Bello who is the first Ecuadorian to travel to space.

This project has a great benefit for learning-teaching a large part of the natural events that happen and how they affect various areas of the Earth's surface. The player will learn to recognize these areas at natural risk and avoid using them so as not to lose the game, but in real life, this project will ensure that the participants (primary, secondary and university education students) understand the importance of adequate territorial planning, for human development.

The tools used are digital elevation models (ASTER) and satellite images (SENTINEL-1A, Google Earth) processed in the free software QGIS. The processing is carried out by students from the Geology and Environmental majors, directed by research professors from those majors. The processing consists of selecting emblematic cities in Ecuador, then obtaining the MDT + images of that sector and analyzing the data in QGIS, HEC-RAS software to generate the graphic interface of the video game. To program the game, a programming code is created with ChatGPT and compiled in C# language and executed in VISUAL STUDIO.

2023 NASA Space Apps Challenge

space geologists