For the Women in Informatics (WINFO) Hackathon, my team and I designed and built OrbitEd, an educational website aimed at introducing middle school students to planetary science through exploration, quizzes, videos, and interactive games. The goal of the project was to make complex scientific concepts feel approachable and engaging by encouraging curiosity and learning through play, rather than using passive instruction as so many educational sites do.

OrbitEd was created in a fast-paced environment - our team of four had to complete it in eight hours! For our final product, we produced both a polished Figma prototype and a small functional HTML/JavaScript site. I created the entire HTML implementation, designed several frames in Figma, did user research, and helped create some of the interactive game elements on the site, which let me wear many hats and do different tasks throughout the competition. 

One of the most interesting parts of this project was realizing that designing for a middle school audience required us to think carefully about clarity and accessibility, because we could not find any middle school students to interview during the period of the hackathon, and we all had forgotten what it was like to be in middle school and learning these concepts.

Something new to me was how a hackathon environment requires a lot of rapid decision-making and communication. With such a limited timeframe, our team had to divide tasks efficiently and adapt as ideas evolved. This experience made me really appreciate slow and intentional design, because working with a team under a tight deadline can be incredibly difficult. I had so much Red Bull and was bouncing off the walls by the end of the competition.

Reaching the finals of the hackathon was an exciting validation of our work, and although we ultimately didn’t win, the experience itself was incredibly rewarding. Making this game started my interest in using games as a way to educate people about topics or issues that are important to me. It also exposed me to the importance of conducting user research, especially if you are designing for a demographic that you are not a part of. Trying to justify why middle schoolers would enjoy our planetary education site to a bunch of judges without any direct user research was quite difficult. However, it was still an incredibly fun experience, and I am excited to try out more hackathons in the future! 

LINK to project file