On April 6, NGO “Association Noosphere” celebrated its birthday. Over our years in existence, we have united a community of people who love science, space, technology and innovation. We held many events and achieved many successes together, and we’d like to tell our story in numbers.
1. The first official competition with the American VEX robotics platform in Ukraine. In 2023, Association Noosphere held the VEXcode VR Cleanup Challenge, which gathered a record 783 participants and put Ukraine on the international map of official robotics events.
2. Planetarium Noosphere has represented Ukraine at international full-dome film festivals for two years in a row, earning recognition from demanding juries and audiences from around the world in Jena (Germany), Brno (Czech Republic) and Macon, Georgia (USA). This year, full-dome films and animations produced by Planetarium Noosphere will be shown for the second time at the Fulldome Festival in Brno.
3. BestRoboFest, the largest technology festival in Ukraine, organized by Noosphere, was held for the third time in Dnipro.
4. The Noosphere Space Art Challenge national children’s drawing competition has been held four times. Thousands of children from all over Ukraine have submitted their art. In 2022, the children’s drawings became illustrations for the book Ukraine Space Hotel by Australian children’s author Jade Maitre. Currently, registration for the fifth competition is ongoing.
5. Five cities were visited by VEX constructors as part of the VEX Marathon project. VEX Go and VEX 123 constructors traveled to Dnipro, Poltava, Kyiv, Odesa, and Lviv. Young roboticists and their mentors from these cities had the chance to learn about robotics using VEX constructors.
6. The Vernadsky Challenge engineering startup competition has been held six times in Ukraine. Every year from 2015 to 2020, innovators from all over the world competed for grants to develop their startups.
7. For seven years in a row, NGO “Association Noosphere” has organized the local stage of the NASA Space Apps Challenge, the world’s largest space hackathon. In 2023, it gathered a record 245 participants from acrossUkraine, as well as Ukrainians in Greece, Lithuania, and Norway.
9. Association Noosphere has held nine educational events on robotics on VEX constructors. In 2020, we held the Noosphere Engineering Race, and we would hold another six Noosphere robotics events through 2023.
10. Noosphere Engineering School celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2023. The network currently includes 14 laboratories in eight cities across Ukraine.
100. Association Noosphere has organized more than a hundred events since its founding. Our initiatives have covered a wide range of directions and topics, from rocket modeling to scientific conferences and sports.
1,000. More than a thousand space enthusiasts have taken part in the local stage of the NASA Space Apps Challenge Dnipro space hackathon during its seven years with Association Noosphere. During this time, the participants of the Dnipro competition have prepared many successful projects. Several teams that won at the Dnipro local stage continued their triumphant journey at the global level. For example, in 2017 the Spacer team earned a spot in the top 10 of the People’s Choice nomination, and in 2020, the FireWay team won the Best Use of Technology award. The NEXT SPACE LAB team was named to the list of Global Finalist Honorable Mentions, which includes the top 47 of the 5,300+ teams from around the world who entered the 2022 challenge.
2,000. Over 2,000 schoolchildren and students have taken part in four Noosphere Space Games virtual rocket modeling competitions. They worked on their projects in the Kerbal Space Program simulation game, which reproduces the conditions of real space, from aerodynamics to orbital physics.
15,000. The record-breaking Noosphere Space Art Challenge in 2021 collected 15,000 drawings by children from 200 cities, towns, and villages across Ukraine. The youngest artist was only 3 years old. The theme of the 2021 contest was 30 Years of Space Independence.
30,000. During the four years of the Noosphere Space Art Challenge, young artists have submitted 30 thousand space drawings.
This is just the beginning. We are sure that we have many more amazing numbers, impressive achievements, and wonderful people who will join the Noosphere community in the years to come.