Last 3rd May we presented the award “Best Project related to Cervantes world” of NASA Space Apps Zaragoza 2016 (http://spaceappszaragoza.com) that took place on 23rd and 24th April. A part of this award, sponsored by GeoSLab, was composed by the two books of Don Quixote written by Cervantes and the known as Quixote of Avellaneda or apocryphal Quixote.

Fantastic job of Alba, Javier, Guillermo, Daniel, Pedro y Eduardo that captivated us with their project “AwesoMoon”, a mobile app to help children to locate the moon and tell them stories related to this great satellite. In addition, the app includes a game with questions of scientific culture, in general, and astronomy, in particular, to introduce children in the history of astronomy.

The event was attended by 47 participants distributed in 9 teams that carried out projects in diverse domains. Some examples of outcomes were: an app that helps shepherds to optimize their routes in function of available green areas, other to help people with respiratory problems to get the best information about air quality and another that provides navigation among a record of catastrophic events to support scientific community work and raise society awareness.

Two projects go to the international phase and will be examined by a NASA jury that will revise its quality and decide if they are world winners or not. The first is “TimeFlies”, an app that uses Artificial Intelligence techniques to predict which flights have more probability of suffering a delay. The second, that was also selected by all participants in the event as the best project, is called X-Space and consist on translating the experience of a moon landing using Virtual Reality (VR). The required equipment is composed of “Oculus Rift” glasses and an office chair hacked with motors and electronic devices that are synchronized with the actions the person makes inside his virtual spacecraft while is moon-landing.