Kepler's Horizon

Our entry for the 2024 NASA Space Apps Challenge — "Chronicles of Exoplanet Exploration", which we built as CosmicClassroom — became the Swiss (CH) winner and was nominated for the global round representing Switzerland. The goal: make complex astronomical data and exoplanet science genuinely accessible to people with cognitive or visual impairments.

Two hard problems, 48 hours#

• The brief was vague on purpose. NASA's challenges are broad and open-ended. Half the work was reducing a huge, ambiguous specification down to one clear, focused core product — modular enough to flex as the challenge-makers gave feedback, small enough to actually ship in a weekend.
• The team was hybrid and remote. Four people, part in Zürich and part remote, coordinated through Discord. We split the work by core competency so the distributed setup sped us up instead of slowing us down, and reached a working MVP fast.

How AI carried the accessibility goal#

The heart of the product is an AI-assisted learning layer: it takes complex scientific texts and data and breaks them down, in real time, into simplified, audience-appropriate "learning bites." That is what turns dense NASA source material into something a person with a cognitive impairment can actually follow — the model does the reduction, continuously, so the content stays approachable without a human rewriting every page.

We built it "simplicity first," so the whole thing stays fast and reliable, behind an intentionally minimal, barrier-free interface.

Stack: Next.js (Vercel) · Python · FastAPI · OpenAI API.