NOAA 2017 Internship

About

During the summer of 2017, after finishing my junior year of high school at East High School, I had the honor of doing an internship at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The internship started on June 12, 2017, and concluded on July 21, 2017, which was about 1.5 months. At NOAA, I worked for NOAA’s Science On a Sphere team, which works on NOAA’s SOSx and Tour Builder software.

SOSx can be explained as follows:

Science On a Sphere® (SOS) is a room-sized, global display system that uses computers and video projectors to display planetary data onto a six-foot diameter sphere, analogous to a giant animated globe. (source)

SOSx’s Tour Builder is a software tool that allows users to make “tours” for an SOS. Tours can be explained as follows:

Tours are scripted presentations (similar in concept to PowerPoint presentations) that run on SOSx and take a user through the datasets and can include a storyline. Tours often include text, images, guiding questions, pop-up web content, videos, clickable place marks, audio, pausing for user input, etc. (source)

SOSx’s tech stack was mainly Unity and C#. I’m not exactly sure what Tour Builder’s tech stack was. The 3D models were edited/made with tools like Blender, and some of the models came from the internet as long as they had an open-source license.

I interned at NOAA’s Boulder office, right next to NIST, where I mainly helped with the development of NOAA’s SOSx by using the Tour Builder software. I created an educational tour of the Apollo 11 mission. For the tour, I got 3D models (Blender files) of the Apollo 11 Rocket, Voyager One, and the Apollo 11 Lunar Module from the internet, which were added into SOSx thanks to some of the SOSx developers. The tour contains many images and videos. The images are from Google Images and edited with macOS’s Preview app. The videos are from YouTube and edited with macOS’s iMovie app. The text and overall “tour editing” were done using SOS’s Tour Builder software.

During the internship, I also experimented with creating a video game in Unity. In this game, the goal was to have the player drive an Apollo rocket to Mars and try to land it. Due to time constraints, the game was never finished and was still in a very early development stage. But, I did get the rocket and Mars assets added to the game, and I got basic rocket controls working. I used C# as the programming language, and I would say it benefited my coding journey.

Tour Demo

Conclusion

Working as a high school intern at NOAA was a great experience. It was an early introduction to the STEM field, and I learned a lot in those 1.5 months. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to do an internship at such an amazing scientific agency at such an early age.

Pictures

NOAA's Boulder Sign

View From The Office

My Desk Setup