Hopes and Dreams

Very cool college research game

Comment

Inspiration

As students who have been through the college application process, we know how painful and stressful the entire process can be. In order to make this process a bit more enjoyable for the student, as well as their family and friends, we created a guessing game: Hopes and Dreams - The Ultimate High School Guessing Game.

What it does

Hopes and Dreams is a clue-like guessing game where students try to guess what colleges their friends are applying to. Through various data analytics methods, we can scrape all the colleges that an individual is applying to, and present the list in the form of a guessing game to their classmates who want to play our game.

When the game starts, a user inputs the name of their friend, as well as the colleges they already know their friend is applying to. With this information, we present the user with 9 colleges, one of which is a college their friend is putting in an application for. When the user clicks on a college, we show them the college's statistics - tuition, general location, and average SAT score. If one of these statistics matches the statistics of the college the user is trying to guess, that is shown on the display. With more guesses, the user will eventually find all the statistics of the college their friend is applying to -- and will subsequently be able to guess said college.

How we built it

We used Flask for the backend, SQLite for the database, and HTML, CSS, javascript for the frontend.

Challenges we ran into

There were many development issues we ran into -- from SQLite query errors to simply styling a complex game with pure HTML and CSS.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We had to rewrite the majority of the code overnight to fix unexplainable bugs.

What we learned

In terms of development, our team members were able to acquire new debugging abilities, and more importantly, the grit to continue working on code that is FUBAR.

What's next for Hopes and Dreams

Ultimately, Hopes and Dreams helps students research colleges that their friends, not themselves, are applying to. We want to stress this bizarre phenomenon that occurs in college admissions -- that oftentimes where your classmate is EDing to is more important than anything else when determining your own college application list. We hope to improve this social aspect of applying to college, turning a negative, competitive experience into a positive, collaborative one: by allowing individuals to bet (or short) on their friends' college outcomes.

Share this project:

Updates