300 participants, expected to enroll at the Space Apps Challenge international supported by NASA in Romania
300 visionaries are expected to enroll at international Space Apps competition. The event takes place with the support of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). In Romania, the people interested to participate, can enroll, depending on the preferences, by clicking on the dedicated submission pages for București, Cluj-Napoca, Iași and Timișoara. The event will take place between 20th and 21st October 2018, simultaneously in these 4 cities in the country. SpaceApps will be organised in other approximately 200 cities around the world.
The competition is addressed to any programmer, scientist, designer, storyteller, creator, builder, software specialist or science fan that wants be involved in solving the challenges proposed by NASA. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration encourages also the participation of highschool and university students, but also of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), without any age limitations.
The generic theme of this year’s edition is “Earth and Space!” with the secondary topics: “You Can Build a …” , “Help Others to Discover the Earth”, “Volcanoes, Volcanoes, Icebergs, and Asteroids (Oh My)”, “The World Is Needing Now … “,”An Icy Glare” and “An Universe of Beauty and Wonders”.
The participants will form teams that will start developing the projects on Saturday morning, October 20, and will have to finalize them by Sunday, October 21. The registered teams are invited to bring their own devices to work on the projects.
In each of the four cities, juries will be formed, including experts and science and astronomy enthusiasts. Following the competition, each of juries will nominate two teams / solutions from each participating city that will enter the NASA-led international assessment process. Pre-selected teams will have up to a week to create a video of 30 seconds to pitch their project. Finalists for the global awards finalists will be announced maximum six weeks after the local contest, and NASA will announce the global winner in January 2019.
In Romania, the official partners of Space Apps event powered by NASA are Discovery Channel, UiPath, Cooperativa FRUFRU, Coaching Partners.
In Romania, the competition is coordinated by the Digital Transformers – Innovation Studio. The purpose of the event is to correlate NASA data in a collaborative manner with people around the world who can find solutions to these challenges.
SpaceApps is an innovative NASA incubation program held annually since 2012 around the world. In 2017, the largest edition was organized with more than 25,000 participants from 6 continents and 187 cities, who developed and submitted over 2,000 projects during the event in response to the challenges NASA proposed.