NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is about to “roll out” a new look and format for what was formerly called the NASA OPTIMUS PRIME Spinoff Challenge. Don’t let the name change confuse you: NASA’s OPTIMUS PRIME Spinoff Promotion and Research Challenge (OPSPARC) is still a contest that challenges students to help raise awareness and understanding of NASA technologies and their many benefits to our everyday lives.
Fans of the TRANSFORMERS brand will pick up on the play on words between the contest name, OPSPARC, and the “AllSpark” from the TRANSFORMERS universe. The AllSpark is what gave the TRANSFORMERS robots life and knowledge, which they use to help mankind — just like NASA spinoffs.
“Changing the name not only makes the challenge easier to say and remember, but it also ties the concept of spinoff technologies to the TRANSFORMERS universe in a clever and unique way,” said Darryl Mitchell, OPSPARC project lead at NASA Goddard.
The newest incarnation of the challenge will provide contestants, students in grades 3 through 12, with a new tool, developed by Glogster, for creating and submitting their entries. Glogster is a cloud-based platform for presentation and interactive learning. The tool will allow contestants to combine different kinds of media on a virtual canvas to create multimedia posters and to access an existing library of educational content created by students and educators worldwide. Contestants will create a Glog of their own as part of OPSPARC that will include information on spinoffs and NASA missions, and video describing their own ideas for a new NASA spinoff technology.
Twenty teams of students in grades 9 through 12, after completing their Glogs, will be invited to work with college student mentors to further develop their spinoff concept within a 3-D, multi-user, virtual world setting through creation of computer-aided design (CAD) models and application of engineering and business analyses on their spinoff concepts. This year’s InWorld portion of the contest is being sponsored by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope project.
“This year is going to be bigger and better than any of our previous contests,” Nona Cheeks, chief of Goddard’s Innovative Technology Partnerships Office, said. “We not only have the change in name and contest platform, we have one of NASA’s largest projects, the James Webb Space Telescope, on board to help with OPSPARC. And you never know what surprises Hasbro and our OPSPARC team have up their sleeves for the awards ceremony and workshop.”
Students who submit the winning entries in each age category will have the opportunity to visit NASA Goddard for an awards ceremony and workshop to be held in their honor. The workshop will include a behind-the-scenes look at Goddard, the chance to meet some of the top minds at NASA, and the opportunity for the students to design and create their own public service announcement video with guidance from NASA video producers and actor Peter Cullen, the voice of the TRANSFORMERS character OPTIMUS PRIME. One of the two high school winners of the 2014-2015 contest, Kelly DeRees, described her experience at the workshop as, “…a wonderful experience that I’ll never forget, and I really appreciate the time you took to make it all work.”
NASA and OPTIMUS PRIME want you to seek out and discover the many NASA technologies with spinoff applications, and to “be the spark” that helps inspire new uses of NASA technologies to benefit humankind. Registration for OPSPARC begins on Jan. 11, 2016.
TRANSFORMERS and OPTIMUS PRIME are trademarks of Hasbro and are used with permission.
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For more information, and to register for the contest, please visit the OPSPARC website: http://itpo.gsfc.nasa.gov/optimus/index.php