Mission Ops Dashboard — A Space Course for Curious 12-Year-Olds
A custom interactive dashboard at the centre of a K-12 space course, with a world map, hotspot events, telemetry, an activity feed, and a 3D orbital globe.
Project Overview
A K-12 STEM edtech studio that had run a successful chemistry course and wanted to launch a space course built for curious 12-year-olds. They wanted the dashboard to BE the course, not a sidebar to a slide deck, and they needed it to ship into Schoology and Google Classroom without IT involvement.
The brief was a 6-week curriculum delivered as a single interactive dashboard, not a sequence of pages with embedded media. The hero promise — a space course built for curious 12-year-olds — had to drive every design choice, from the typography to the way hotspots reveal mission events.
The mission control screen pairs an interactive world map with hotspots tied to real cities, a custom kit of components, subtle data visualizations, a live-style activity feed, and a 3D globe tracing the satellite's path. Every lesson is a configuration of the same pieces, so the dashboard grows without rebuilds.
The aerospace educator on the team reviewed every hotspot, orbit path, and telemetry label so the dashboard looks like an ops console without lying to students. Lessons are authored as JSON configurations of the same components, not as bespoke pages, so the content team can ship without touching code.
What's Inside
6-week curriculum
Orbital mechanics, satellite ops, mission planning, communications, anomaly response, debrief.
Interactive world map
With mission-event hotspots tied to real cities and per-event briefings.
3D orbital globe
Traces the exact path the satellite takes around Earth.
Live-style activity feed
Event log layered over the world map, with live-feel time-coded events.
Subtle data visualization strip
Data-stream waveform and telemetry cards across the bottom.
Component kit
Data cards, hotspots, mini-maps, event log entries — reusable across all 6 weeks.
What the Client Provided
- A 40-page space curriculum brief (PDF) authored by the studio's curriculum lead
- Review notes from the aerospace educator on the studio's failed first prototype
- Public satellite-orbit data referenced for the orbital globe
- Loom walkthrough from the studio's head of product walking through the hero promise
- Brand guidelines and an existing illustration library from the chemistry course
Design and Build Process
Hero Promise Workshop
Locked the one-line promise: a space course built for curious 12-year-olds. Every subsequent design choice had to earn its place against that line.
Dashboard System Design
Designed the dashboard as a system: world map, hotspots, data cards, event feed, 3D globe, data-stream strip. Every lesson is a configuration of these pieces.
Component Build
Built each component in React with strict prop typing so lessons could be authored as JSON without touching code. Content team can ship a lesson without a deploy.
Content Validation
Cross-checked every hotspot, orbit path, and telemetry label against authoritative aerospace sources. We dropped two lessons that did not survive review and rewrote the satellite-orbit lesson twice.
Classroom Pilot
Piloted with three middle school classes. Cut onboarding from 4 screens to 1 after watching kids skip straight to the map.
Tools and Stack
Deliverables
- Live dashboard (web app)
- 6 weeks of lesson configurations authored as JSON
- Reusable component library (map, globe, hotspots, feed, data cards)
- Lesson authoring guide for the studio's content team
- Teacher-facing weekly lesson packet (PDF)
- Embedded directly into the studio's course website, with SCORM 1.2 + 2004 packages for Schoology, Google Classroom, and LearnDash
- Source files and asset library
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