Dr Finder Finds the Shortest Path to Dijkstra

This was built as an educational aid for elementary to middle school stem students. It gives a basic rundown to the algorithms and data structures you shoul know before learning about Dijkstras Algo

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Inspiration

The inspiration was a combination of a running joke (Dr. Finder) and an idea given to us by a mentor that lead us to the route of an educational game. Originally it was going to be a game to help kids that have adhd remember things but as we discussed the idea evolved and become something bigger than we could have ever imagined; Dr Finder Finds the Shortest Path

What it does

Here we have created a video game that both entertains as well as educates. This game is focused for the audience of elementary to middle school stem students, to help you young minds of the future get a head start on simple yet massively important topics. These topics include many Data Structures staples, such as Queue, Bubble Sort, Nodes, Edges, Graphs, BFS, and finally Djikstra's

How we built it

We built this game using pygame and python3, Kake also used pixel art platforms to create the beautiful art.

Challenges we ran into

We ended up running out of time to finish all of our teaching slides, so we substituted our queue slide and puzzle for the remaining levels. We had a lot of difficulty in the beginning because we have never designed a game before and we had trouble choosing a library/language and dowloading them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was our first in depth project that we built outside of our classes, we are extremely proud that we were able to finish this in time with all functionality and proof of concept complete.

What we learned

We got a lot of practice using shared repositories, and primarily using Pygame. Initially, we attempted to use SDL2 to implement our game engine, but we spent hours troubleshooting it on our machines and couldn't get it to work. Pygame was daunting, since the three of us have very little collective Python experience, but we learned how to implement multiple data structures, as well as a how to create a fully functional game with working U.I.

What's next for Dr Finder Finds the Shortest Path to Dijkstra

We plan on fully implementing the rest of the levels with better teaching strategies, like mini games instead of "homework" problems. We also plan to expand the Boss fight and add projectiles and phases, as well as lives and a win/loss condition

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