NASA opens its files for the Space Apps Challenge
Santo Domingo. Next weekend, 20 and 21 in April, an intensive workshop will be held in the country to identify the Dominican team that will represent the Dominican Republic in the "NASA International Space Apps Challenge", a global 48 hours contest where They capture applications and / or actions on the internet, which may be potential tools for mass use, in space matters and social development issues.
Dominican Republic, through Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo (INTEC), will be one of the 50 locations where the global contest will be held and the registrations are open through www.intec.edu.do
The international event of 48 consecutive hours of programming aims to create programs in space matter using data collected by NASA and European space agencies in recent years, which are available to the public during the competition. This is data that there was no way to access and that is precisely open for creatives to use to solve problems in the framework of the Open Government initiative.
That is why NASA invites programmers, artists, designers, communicators, thinkers and creators to integrate part of the teams. Professionals, students and the general public with knowledge of application development or graphic design can participate.
The event is officially held in the country since last year and has involved more than 30 Creole developers that add to the thousands distributed in 17 countries around the world, who stand out for diverse projects among themselves, many of them with applications with social orientation.
This year it has the sponsorship of Microsoft, Wind Telecom, GikPlus, Si TV and Coca Cola (Bepensa).
Dominicans featured in the 2012 competition
In the Space Apps Challenge of 2012 the application that represented the country in the contest was The Pineapple Project, created by the group "Taínos" integrated by Elminson De Óleo, Camilo García and Armando Medina, two professionals and a student of Software Engineering of the INTEC, respectively, which it classified as the most innovative project, with international standards.
The application "The Pineapple Project" makes use of the data collected by NASA on the climate and the feasibility of the terrain of any place on earth so that, according to its location, farmers can obtain accurate information about which fruits or vegetables they will have better growing conditions in the place where they are. In addition, the application allows obtaining other very important data on the planting and commercialization of the product. For example, it allows you to publish the price of the crop and compare it with the prices of the other farmers.
More details about the event are available at: www.spaceappschallenge.org/
For more detail about the type of applications that need to be developed:
www.spaceappschallenge.org/challenges/