Homework Game

Make homework fun by earning points in this simple game!

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💡 Inspiration + 🤔 What it does

Traditional school homework isn’t exciting. A piece of paper, inked with incomprehensible words, marked with hours of work spent, only to be lost to the turn-in bin– that is what traditional school homework is. According to a middle school student, “Homework is stressful, a single number can throw off the course of your life.” This can lead to no incentive to do homework. Homework Game aims to rectify these issues, combining the games that people all love with homework, to make a fun game about homework.

🔨 How we built it

The first day of the hackathon was devoted to brainstorming ideas. There were ideas ranging from incredibly complex and unachievable (at our coding level and time limit) artificial intelligence, cliché ideas, and ideas that were already commonplace. After much tedious brainstorming, we settled on the idea of making homework fun. This eventually evolved into Homework Game.

The Homework Game webpage is built using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (with the jQuery framework) with a Python Flask web server. We eventually used this design as two of our members had a decent experience in front-end development and the other two members had experience in Python.

After selecting an idea, we worked on building the front-end UI. After drawing several designs of the webpage on a whiteboard, we settled on a minimalist design that would benefit the consumer. Afterward, we worked on the JavaScript and Python back-end code. This wasn’t really that organized as we were just implementing ideas as they came up.

😥 Challenges we ran into

One major challenge was brainstorming plausible and achievable yet unique ideas. This would set us back a lot as time that could have been spent coding was spent brainstorming. Another major challenge that lowered our productivity was the wide variety of skill sets in our team. Since our team’s skill set was so spread out, we found that we weren’t really working together coding. The team not working together can also be blamed for the communication problems our team faced. Since we all had different schedules, there were rarely times when the whole team was online. Thus, it was quite hard to collaborate, which hindered some of our progress.

😎 Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of being able to use our different skill sets to our advantage. Since we had a wide skill set, we found it hard to collaborate, and thus our productivity declined. Furthermore, we’re really happy that we managed to develop a working yet elegant design in the limited time we had.

📚 What we learned

While building Homework Game, we learned to consider the consumers first. There were times when we wanted to postpone adding essential features to the consumers in the prototype since it would be difficult to code in our time span. We ended up implementing the features when we considered what it would be like for a consumer to lack an essential feature in the app. In Homework Game, there are many features that we implemented with the consumer in mind, like modals, which are a lot easier to use than classic JavaScript alert boxes.

🌇 What's next for Homework Game

There awaits so much more for Homework Game, but there are limitations to how much we can get done in three days. Features that we would love to add to Homework Game in the future include:

  • A game profile
  • Minigames to incentivize
  • More gift shop items
  • Add classes for better organization
  • A login system
  • The ability to view finished assignments.
  • The ability for students to report mistakes
  • The ability to delete my assignments as it may clog up space.
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