Henry's Farm Adventures (Zumorroda-X)

Problem

How farmers adapt to heat waves, floods, drought and salinization — and how satellite data reveals those risks — is hard for students and non-experts to grasp.

Solution

A Phaser web game in which a struggling farmer travels to India (2021 heat), Pakistan (2022 floods), Egypt (salinization), the United States (drought) and Brazil (crop management); each stop turns NASA data — heat maps, Landsat before-and-after imagery, NDVI, the U.S. Drought Monitor — into a mini-game, plus a small model that predicts crop survival from CO₂ levels and adaptation choices.

Demo moment

Team-described: sliding between NASA satellite images of Pakistan before and after the 2022 floods, then placing straw and drainage pipes to save the fields.

Why it stood out

• organizer statedWon the award for the project that most effectively combines technical and creative skills.Source ↗
• organizer statedPuts the player in a farmer's shoes on a world journey, so adapting to climate hazards is experienced rather than read.Source ↗
• team statedEvery level is anchored in a real place and event (India's 2021 heat, Pakistan's 2022 floods) with the matching NASA imagery.Source ↗
• team statedStates its own limits (some hazards, such as wildfires, are not covered), which reads as honest scope.Source ↗
• curator inferenceThe game framing turns an agriculture-data challenge into empathy plus learning, which works for judges who are not agronomists.

Lessons for your next hackathon

• Let the user play the stakeholder; empathy is a judging advantage.
• Anchor each scene in a real place, date and dataset.
• When an award rewards art and technology together, staff both on purpose.