Hello, World!

Engaging character-user relationship
Promotes participation of the user in the activities
Education aspect is more enticing with the aesthetic environment

Inspiration

The Problem We as a group decided to head into tamuHACK with the intention to solve a problem. One of the group members has had previous experience with teaching programming to young adults. They had proposed that it was generally very hard to keep kids intrigued with classes and what ended up happening was a lack of interest or abundance of failure. This is what became the drive to our project.

What it does

The What It is a game. Its purpose is to be fun and engaging, but at the same time, the idea was that it would be pleasing to the eye and not lacking "content" to keep someone learning a programming language for the first time closely intrigued.

How we built it

The program that was used to make the program was Godot, a free open-source game engine. Coming into tamuHACK we not only wanted to face challenges with real problems, but we also wanted to explore new avenues. Godot works with an object-oriented style format that mainly works with "scenes". Godot allows for almost millions of different tools to combine different objects, text boxes, and images, but that also posed a problem.

Challenges we ran into

The problem that we faced with this project is the amount of dedication and patience it took to sift through SO many different tools and functions. Especially with the object-oriented programming aspect, it was very difficult to determine what combination of functions lead to our desired result. Our patience was tested even more as there were millions upon millions more online tutorials that basically all gave different solutions to the same problem. In some cases, choosing one of them would end up being fine for the future, but, in most cases, it was a hassle to realize that we couldn't continue with our decision because of things like object declaration or non-static variables.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We as an entire team agree that the accomplishment we are proud of most is the amount of effort we put into the project. Everybody thinks that one another worked extremely hard to not only visualize our wonderful ideas but also come up with ideas that came for the benefit of the project and in the interest of solving our issue.

What we learned

It is SO VERY tedious to make a game. We all wanted to explore new avenues and create something we have never tried before. At first, we thought it would be pretty simple, but actually going into it it became plainly obvious how repetitive and taxing it was. The organization that was needed not only with us but also with our folders was just ridiculous and the setup and planning before we even started the project brought up a lot of issues we did not realize existed.

What's next for Hello, World!

In the time we had, we focused more on the quality of what we had and we did end up finishing everything we planned to do, but we also had more hopes for the project. Here, we only branched into python, but we also wanted to branch out to other languages like Java, C++, go, and many others as we wanted this to cover the scope of ALL programming. We also only had time to make one of the levels, and focusing on the quality of the one was completely worth it. However, we still had many more ideas as to what we could have for levels and implementations such as conditionals, loops, and logic errors. While we were able to satisfy what we came to do, we are also leaving with a stronger urge to improve.