Inspiration
Our project was inspired by a drive to create a new free study tool for college students of all backgrounds to be able to study what they want, when they want, for as long as they want. There are many study tools that are locked behind a paywall so we wanted to give students a new way to study in a new environment and new tech ecosystem such as Discord.
What it does
Our project creates flashcards that the user can utilize to study. Once the program starts it prompts the user to enter in as many questions and their answers as they please. Then it randomly spits out questions and the user must type in the answer to get it right and move on to the next question. The program goes on for as long as the user wants and whenever they want to stop they can just type "exit".
How we built it
We built the project in java primarily by using concepts we have learned from the beginning of CS-180. Both of us have only started coding in college, so we relied heavily on the fundamentals that we already know. First, we imported scanner to make a scanner that looks for user input. Then, we put scanner into a condition for a loop where the loop would continue if there was a next line in the scanner, which would continue until the string "exit" were entered. Inside of the loop, each line takes an integer mod 2 to assign it to either questions or answers, and then increments the aforementioned integer by one. This allowed us to use our new knowledge of array lists to indefinitely add strings to be referenced later. After the user inputs all their questions and answers, we important java.util.Random to randomly select an integer from the length of the set of questions and save that value. The system then prints out the question at that value from the array of questions and checks if the inputted string is equal to the stored answer at the same spot in the answer array. If the answer matches, then the user gets a new question, and if the user is incorrect, then they are prompted to try again. The user additionally gets the chance to exit at any point by inputting "exit". Additionally, to make our program more robust, we made it not case sensitive, so that a capitalization error would not force the user to try again.
Challenges we ran into
The primary recurring challenge that we ran into was our lack of experience. We did not initially know about array lists or anything about how to make a discord bot, but we fought through our inexperience to at least try to make a valuable product. Our flash card maker does work within intelliJ, but due to time constraints and scanners not working on discord text, our discord bot is not fully functional. If we had more time we would've liked to complete this bot for a more widespread implementation of our project.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of showing up and showing out despite our limited experience. There are many people competing who have been coding for far longer than we have, but despite all that we still competing and produced a working product. Additionally , we are proud of somewhat implementing the bot into Discord. Both of us had no idea on how to actually make a discord bot before this and we had to learn by following tutorials online. We got the bot to function to inside of a discord server where it can take one user input before not working which is a whole lot better than taking zero user input and not showing up inside the server. Finally we're proud of working together as a team to create something greater than the sum of its parts.
What we learned
We primarily learned that coding isn't quite as hard as it seems if you are collaborative. The mentors and online tutorials we consulted were indispensable in us completing what we were able to get done. The technical skills we learned were arrays, the random utility in java, and the basics of how to create a discord bot.
What's next for Flash Card Creator
The next step for Flash Card Creator is to make it into Flash Card Bot that people can utilize in their discord servers. This would be great for individual or group studying as many people could sit in VC while using the Flash Card Bot to study.
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