So I’ve been taking a course in web design and for my “graduation” project, I’ve decided to build a website aimed at teaching astronomy to kids, specifically focussing on the Solar System. The actual web design bit is going OK. The problem is that I’m struggling to find enough ideas to fill the site.
For instance, I decided to have a page for different kinds of calculators so users could find out how basic facts about themselves would change if they were on other planets. For example, I have one calculator which asks users to put their age in a box and then choose one of the planets from a drop-down menu. The calculator then tells you how old you would be on that planet. So if I entered my age (34) and chose Mercury, the calculator tells me “If you had been born on the planet Mercury, you would be about 141 years old. This is because there are only 88 Earth days in a year on Mercury”.
I’ve got a similar calculator which tells you how much you weigh on other planets and a third which tells you how long it would take to circumnavigate each planet if you walked, drove an F1 car, or flew a fighter jet.
The trouble is, those calculators only take up about half the page! I need 3 more calculators to fill up the rest of the page. I can’t just make the existing calculators bigger because that would just look weird. I’m completely stuck for inspiration. Does anyone have any ideas for other calculators I could make? I don’t need the code, just some ideas.
Edit: Just in case it helps, I know HTML, CSS, JQuery, and Vanilla JavaScript, but I’m not really familiar with JS frameworks like React or Angular. I can do a little bit of the back-end stuff but ideally I want to keep the whole thing front-end.
I’ve been looking around and I can’t find any other sites which have similar features. To be honest, most professional astronomy sites have better features which require higher level coding skills than I possess.
You could have a calculator about the relative mass of various solar system bodies (e.g. put in any two bodies, let’s say Jupiter and Earth, and the calculator will say “Jupiter’s mass is greater than 317 Earths”).
How about one that lets the user pick two planets and see how long it would take to get from one to the other going the speed of sound, the speed of light, and the speed of some other stuff they are familiar with, like a train or airplane. Similar to your circumnavigate macro. You’d have to just use average distances, of course, since their distances are always changing. But it’s kids… and just homework. So I think it would be fine.
That’s a good one - a slight modification would be to include how long a message takes to travel if you’re talking to someone by phone - something like “if you’re on Mars and your friend is on Earth, you’d have to wait twenty minutes (or whatever) to hear their response to your question”.
It would get way more complicated, but he should be able to find/calculate current relative positions. Then the calculator could include a ‘how long would it take if I waited 6 months to get Earth closer (and would that be faster (obviously not for the speed of light ship)))’.
ETA - here is a site that shows current positions - might be able to borrow code from there.
Creating a “virtual orrery” might be a neat guiding metaphor for your site: Make a canvas, draw the planets as different-colored balls, and move them along orbits represented as ellipses. Get the parameters for the ellipses (you only need two) from NASA along with relative speeds and you’re basically set. The rest is simple Javascript to actually do the work. Then you can add code to allow students to click on the planets to find out more about them, run the simulation at different speeds, jump to specific times, and so on. You could even let them view it from edge-on, showing the planets are not all in the same plane.
Here’s what I’m talking about: Notice it doesn’t do gravity. It has bodies moving along in greased grooves, completely pre-programmed orbits. Introducing a physics engine sufficient to make the orbits by modeling gravity would make this more complicated, and would inevitably make the simulation unstable after some period of time, due to rounding errors and the inherent instability of multi-body problems.
Open your page with a “You are here” sign that shows a tiny dot on the planet, with other planets (or just Mars and the moon) in view. As they scroll in, it takes them closer and closer to the planet, down to their address. You’d need to be able to pull their location from their ISP or something.
??? Take a look at your site on a smartphone ???. Not an iPad, a phone. One calculator per page is enough. More is too much.
Then if you want fill up with text or pictures. That stuff will scroll down the bottom of the page when viewed on a phone, so don’t put anything important there.
But in answer to the question asked:
The calculators I use don’t worry too much about filling up the page, and the calculator my grade-school son uses fills up the page with blocks of colors. Either way, only one calculator per page.
Size of the planets when viewed from earth. Size of earth when viewed from planets. Size of plannet when viewed from another planet
Distance from earth, too earth (same), from any plannet to any plannet. In years, km, light minutes solar distance units. and any other unit you can think of.
