Piloting red rover

a programming game for the american museum of natural history

On July 30th, 2020, NASA launched the Perseverance rover towards Mars. On December 17th, 2020, the American Museum of Natural History launched the browser game Piloting Red Rover, a series of puzzles that I designed, researched, and wrote, on Ology, their website aimed at kids.

Piloting Red Rover lets players step into the shoes of a NASA employee sending strings of instructions to Perseverance. The goal: to collect a sample of Martian soil or stone, then place it in a cache. As players look down on the rover from above, they have to use spatial reasoning and critical thinking to program basic blocks of code. And don’t let the educational nature fool you - this is fun for players of all ages!

Piloting Red Rover is deeply researched and fact checked. Here are a few things I learned about Martian geology while researching:

• The Curiosity rover discovered organic molecules in three-billion-year-old rocks, which makes those rocks 2.75 billion years older than the first dinosaurs.

• Scientists tested Perseverance in a dry, dusty part of Australia prior to launch.

• Perseverance looks small and lightweight, but it weighs 2,260 pounds.

This game was made in collaboration with Rowan Wood (programming and design), Qin Yin (art and UI design), and Ryan Powell (music). It stemmed from a project created in Matt Parker’s Designing for Museums class at NYU.