Introduction
A spaceship is a special aircraft designed and built to fly in the outer space. Spaceships are used to explore the universe, collect weather information, observe the earth and launch communication satellites. Currently, there are over seventy countries that have space programs. The notable ones include United States, Russia, China, India, United Kingdom and North Korea. These countries spend billions of dollars in space technology each year. It takes an average of about twenty years to build and launch spaceship into the space. This is because space ship building requires the highest level of precision. This time can be reduced by teaching the space building technology in elementary schools located in US. The students in these schools have the capacity of learning the technology and applying it in building spaceships. To this end, this project intends to transfer the space building technology to elementary schools. The project involves building of spaceship by distributing tasks to individual students. The space exploration is gaining a lot of interest from governments across the world. Consequently, the space programs are projected to rise in the future. By investing in the space ship building, schools and individual students are poised to benefit immensely from the project. Successful schools shall receive contracts for building spaceships from exploration agencies across the world. The students will also be recruited to work in space programs in United States and other countries. More importantly, the students will get the opportunity to travel to space using their spacecraft.
The interested students and schools shall interact with the project coordinators through an online system written in major programming and scripting languages which include Java, JavaScript and Ruby on Rails. The system shall target school administrators and boards who are the school decision makers. It shall also be used by elementary school students between the ages of eight and fourteen years old who have been registered in the project. The system shall contain menus for general information that shall be viewed by anybody who wants to know about the project. Interested administrators shall register their schools by keying relevant information requested by the system. Once, approved, the system shall grant the administrator the privileges of registering students’ involved in the project together with the instructors. The administrators’ panel shall have links for viewing budget, resources, schedules, progress and reports from students and instructors. Besides, the panel shall have online support for contacting the project coordinators. The students’ panel shall have video tutorials for making space ship organized in levels. Each level shall consist of tasks that each student will be expected to do within a specified timeframe. The panel shall also have a system for reporting progress and application for contacting instructors. Besides, the students’ panel shall have an online discussion forum where they shall post questions, answers and comments regarding the project. The content of the discussion forum shall be viewed by all students undertaking the project in US. The instructors’ panel shall contain a list of students, task assigned to each student, progress reports and tutorials. The instructor shall be able to communicate to students, administrator and project’s technical support team using the system. The main feature of this system shall be an online space ship building simulation.
This application shall be developed using Java program and it shall be accessible to instructors and students. The students and instructors shall use various online resources to design and build a spaceship from scratch. The system shall allow them to manipulate inputs and view the results. It shall also have an application for calculating various parameters required in the process of building the space ship. This system shall be hosted in Apache server running on Linux Operating system. Apache server supports many configurations that are necessary for the system to run smoothly. Linux provides greater security features needed to protect the data and information contained in the system. The contents of the system shall be viewed by all major browsers which include Mozilla, Opera Mini, Internet Explorer and Safari. The client shall only be expected to install Java Runtime Environment and Flash in order to view tutorials and use simulation application.
