CandidateCatch

A fun and mindless presidential bucket-ball game that will keep you playing for hours and voting in the next election

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Inspiration

On the first day of my Government class, someone asked why Trump was a communist... Clearly, politics wasn't that big of an issue for students in my high school.

What it does

This bucket-ball game of political trivia increases political awareness among younger generations by "gamifying" politics just in time for the 2016 elections. Candidates' faces, represented as balls, fall from the top of the screen as the user tries to catch them in buckets labeled with political statements. If the candidate would agree with the labeled statement on the bucket, the user gets a point! Woohoo! And the user learns more about that certain candidate!

How we built it

We developed our iOS app on XCode using Swift 2.0. We relied heavily on the Sprite-Kit framework to create our game scene and animate the dropping balls and sliding bucket.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was accurately positioning the sprites on the screen where we wanted them to be and to get the candidate heads to fall faster the longer they were falling. In addition, we wanted to get the heads to drop in a random order and random spacing—we enlisted Make School for help with this.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the idea behind our app and its goal—namely, that we are trying to increase political awareness among high schoolers. Many high school seniors and even some juniors will be able to vote this year, and so it was really important for us to create a game that would be educational as well as fun enough to keep them coming back to the app. We are also proud of what we could accomplish using Sprite-Kit, as it is the first time we used the framework.

What we learned

We learned how to use Sprite-Kit to develop games and make our apps more interesting. We also went through a series of iterations on our original idea, after which we realized a great app needed to be simple, educational, and overall mindlessly fun!

What's next for CandidateCatch

We want to include local and state election candidates as well, which typically have even lower voter turnouts. We also want to generate candidates based on geographic location.

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