IGS Teaches Typing

a screenshot of the game

Inspiration

All of us met for the first time at this event and spent our time before the opening ceremony playing TypeRacer. We had access to an Arduino that could play simple songs, a diverse set of skills with little overlap, and a lot of ideas with varying practicality.

What it does

The typing game runs using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with a JQuery dependency. Players must try to type a randomized quote as quickly and accurately as possible to achieve a high-score. This game then connects via BLE to an Arduino with a Piezo element to play music depending upon the success of the player.

How we built it

With each of having different skillsets, we began working separately on different pieces and parts of the project. Some of us worked on the game, some of us worked on the Arduino, some of worked on bug testing, some of us worked on graphics, and piece by piece we merged the different chunks together. In a lot of ways, we were unfamiliar with what we were working on, and we did not expect to even be able to accomplish this, so by splitting people up, we could dedicate people to researching until we could implement the specific item to the main code.

Challenges we ran into

Attempting to host the game on an Apache Webserver (blocked by WiFi and ultimately abandoned because this is out of our control).
Handling JSON files for the quote bank.
Communication between the Arduino and the PC (and whether or not this was even possible)
Lack of experience
Networking is a nightmare.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating anything at all.
Creating a game that is successful, and after extensive bug testing, challenging to break.
Getting the Arduino to connect via BLE.

What we learned

Each of us learned at least a little bit about what everyone else knew. Only one of us was experienced with Arduino, and that was also the case for JavaScript. Generally speaking, every single thing we used was something new for at least one of us in the group.