Buzza - Quiz Bowl Virtual Buzzers

Top Bar displays latest buzz
Log-in Screen
Student View
Teacher Dashboard View

Inspiration

I am an avid participant in my school's quiz bowl team. Sadly we don't have any buzzers and purchasing buzzers for the whole team costs upwards of $1,000. I built this app so teams like mine can practise quiz bowl without large costs.

What it does

To use the app, a teacher or club leader starts a game by clicking "new game". Then a random game id is generated which participants can enter along with a username. Then the teacher needs to enable the buzzers by clicking the "Enable Buzzers" button on the leader dashboard. Then when someone wants to buzz they simply click the big "Buzz" button. Then once they are done giving their answer either they can disengage the buzzer or the leader can.

How I built it

I began to build it with a simple structure of how the Socket.io would work. I used Express & Node.js. Then I build a basic UI around it using normal CSS. I also used Javascript to hide elements and create a flow. Finally, I added the teacher dashboard on top of that to make it easier to use.

Challenges I ran into

I major challenge I faced was using Socket.io and building features on top of it so that the game doesn't break in fringe cases. This is also the thing that I am most proud of it as I problem solved my way there.