Explore the Code — Right From Your Phone

🔧 Try It Now: Hack Your Own Score Link

When you finish the mission, the site builds a share link that looks something like this:

Everything after the # is just data written into the link. Try this: open a share link (yours or a friend's), tap the address bar, and change the score or the name. Reload. The celebration card changes!

🧠 Read Real Code: the 10-Decision Brain

This is not a simplified example — it's the actual code running on your phone right now, from the file assets/js/app.js. This one structure holds NASA's answers to all 10 decisions:

const CORRECT_ANSWERS = {
    '4':  'squeeze',      // Decision #1: move to the LM
    '5':  'shutdown',     // Decision #2: power down the CM
    '6':  'freereturn',   // Decision #3: use the Moon's gravity
    '9':  'sunearth',     // Decision #4: navigate by Sun + Earth
    '11': 'burn',         // Decision #5: fire the PC+2 burn
    '12': 'extreme',      // Decision #6: extreme water rationing
    '13': 'buildmailbox', // Decision #7: build the CO2 mailbox
    '16': 'silence',      // Decision #8: low-power comms
    '17': 'jumpstart',    // Decision #9: LM-to-CM recharge
    '18': 'early'         // Decision #10: jettison SM early
};

This is called an object — a list of keys (the slide numbers) paired with values (the right choice). When you lock in a decision, one line of code asks: does your choice equal the value for this key? Ten little questions like that add up to your score.

🌙 The Computer That Flew to the Moon

The phone in your hand is running this website with power to spare. Now meet the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) — the machine that navigated Apollo 13:

• ⚖️ Weighed about 70 pounds — a checked suitcase
• 🧠 Had roughly 4 kilobytes of erasable memory (RAM). Your phone has millions of times more.
• 🧵 Its programs were stored in rope memory — wires literally woven through tiny magnetic rings by hand, mostly by women workers whose weaving had to be perfect. Software you could touch.
• ⌨️ No screen, no mouse — astronauts typed verb and noun codes into a panel called the DSKY ("Verb 37, Noun 31…")
• 👩‍💻 The flight software team at MIT was led by Margaret Hamilton, who helped invent the very idea of "software engineering" as a serious discipline

And here's the Apollo 13 connection you already lived through on slide 19: after days powered down and freezing, the Command Module's computer had to be brought back to life before reentry — a restart sequence nobody had ever tried in flight. It worked. Good code, written carefully, by people who assumed things would go wrong: that's the whole discipline in one story.

🏠 When You Get Home

Everything on this site is open source — free for you to download, break, and rebuild. Three challenges, easiest to hardest:

1. Change a rank name. Find getScoreRank in app.js and rename "Ground Crew" to something of your own.
2. Add a decision timer. Show how many seconds each choice takes.
3. Build your own mission. Copy this project's structure and tell a different story — Apollo 11, a Mars rover, your troop's toughest campout.

The Programming merit badge page shows how these count toward Requirement 5, and the full code is on GitHub.

🦴 Ready for the Real Craft? Build a Walking Skeleton

Tinkering with this site teaches you to read and change code. There's a second path that teaches you what professional software engineers are actually expected to know now — and it was built by the same family that built this exhibit.

The Walking Skeleton Tutorial walks you through building the smallest possible real web app — a "Hello World" with a spine: version control, tests you watch catch a planted bug, configuration, logging, health checks, security, a container, and CI that turns a bad change red before anyone gets hurt. Twenty-one small modules, one commit each, with Claude Code as your patient tutor — it makes one tiny change at a time and asks you to predict what will happen before every check runs. Prediction before action: same discipline Mission Control used for every switch flip on Apollo 13.