Future Beavers (The Byte Sized Beavers)

Our mission is to increase the amount of students who want to pursue STEM careers.

Comment

Inspiration

The inspiration for this project idea was from professor Jason Clark. I am participating in an undergraduate research project which has the same goal as this web app: to increase the amount of students who pursue STEM related careers. While the main idea of the projects are the same, we took a unique approach by implementing a real-world impact as incentive.

What it does

This web app contains mini games for students to play which incorporates a little bit of STEM in it so that kids can have fun but also learn on the side. The purpose of these games is to have fun with STEM, not just learning with a textbook. Our platform contains a variety of games, and these games fall into one of four divisions which determine their difficulty. The demoed game was a kindergarten level coloring challenge that asks the user to draw a picture based on the prompt. After their submission, they will learn a fun fact about what they drew while having fun at the same time. These fun facts are all related to STEM and are easy to comprehend. Completing each prompt will reward the student with ten points. These points can be later converting in the Shop into a real-world impact. For example, a user may plant a tree with only 50 points!

How we built it

We built this using html/css/js/node and the bootstrap css framework. We used Github to collaborate together as a team by using branches. Additionally, our team was determined to implement a Google API in the back-end of our website, and after many hours, we did it!

Challenges we ran into

Github posed a difficult challenge because we struggled to determine the fault in our code during the merge process. Additionally, we started off this Hackathon with very minimal knowledge, so we spent a large portion of our time learning html/css and js as we wrote it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our most important goal was to ensure our design provided a unique perspective to a game-style website. We're proud of our efforts towards this goal, and we feel that we come a long way in our learning.

What we learned

Virtually all skills used to code this project were learned on the spot, including html/css/bootstrap and js.

What's next for Gen Engineers

In the future, we intend to create a teacher/student portal which allows educators to further guide their students through the learning process. We also wish to implement this application nationwide in order to increase the amount of students who will enjoy STEM and ultimately pursue it as a career.

Share this project:

Updates