space-hunters-mars-exploration

Space Hunters: Mars Exploration is a tile-based set of puzzles where players identify distinctive features on Martian surfaces such as lava tubes, lava channels, craters and volcanoes. Each puzzle is shown the player one tile at a time, where each tile is chosen at random. To successfully complete each puzzle, a player should identify all the significant features in the image provided by NASA Mars missions by tapping/clicking the correct revealed tile. On completion, the game briefly explains how the features were formed. Tapping the wrong tile restarts the game.

The players can also create their own puzzle by contributing an image, feature description, and tile numbers on which they have found features. We hope that a large, crowdsourced database will not only enhance a new player's learning experience, but also potentially discover new visual clues that characterize the presence of lava tubes on Mars. We used images from http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/ for the puzzles we created.

The neat thing about this game is that it can be used as a learning and exploration tool for earth too, and pretty much anything else in the photographed universe! The Earth Exploration puzzles, for instance, can be used to identify the key visual elements constituting events such as volcanic eruptions, cyclones, and so on.

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