Fast Math

A way to get young kids to practice arithmetic using their competitive drive

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Inspiration

We thought of this idea while thinking of ways we could have improved in our attention in elementary school learning math and a primary outlier we found was we had no drive to practice math outside of what school taught us, and instead preferred other, more entertaining things to do. However, if given something to compete about that also made us practice math we would have taken math class with a bit more interest and practiced more math so we could beat each other.

What it does

The website was originally designed with a million and one features like private rooms with special leaderboards, but we quickly realized fitting all this stuff into a website in just one weekend would be impossible, even for advanced coders. Thus, we cut many of the design ideas we had although the full blueprint is here for your considerationwe eventually cut the project down to a math bot that would give out 10 random arithmetic equations, and once you got them all correct it would post your name and time to a worldwide leaderboard.

How we built it

We made a base website using html5, then coded in the math bot, leaderboard, and the links in between with python. we then made a timer and UI using javascript and put that all together. Since this was our first time doing something of this scale using code so nearing the end we were a little stressed for time and decided that dropping the video to have time to finish the code and fix the bugs that were stopping us was the decision we wanted to make, but even with the extra time we couldn't finish. here it is

Challenges we ran into

We had an overall lack of time for the amount of work we had to do, but we also had issues with the math checking, where the math bot would decide that a wrong answer was right or just not make a decision. We also had problems while working on the UI with some buttons half off-screen and boxes moving to places where they had to business being.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We got a lot of the site done even with our minimal knowledge of coding and we made it up the mountain. We got a website to work and be functional, and even got a leaderboard system to work in tests. we had good team coordination, and we kept on top of updating the versions we put on Github.

What we learned

We learned a lot about python and java and explored CSS and html5, something we had never done before. We also learned a lot more respect for people who actually design professional websites with these tools.

What's next for Fast Math

Depending on how hectic the next school year is, we may slowly add the features in the Balsamiq design to the site, or we might drop the site to search for more educational pastures, it's all up to the rest of 2020.

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