Critter Calculations

An educational game meant to inspire young students to enjoy and hone their mathematical skills. With adorable drawings by our designers and an interactive UI, it's hard not to smile while playing!

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Inspiration

We are all students who are not only in STEM, but also love to embrace our creative sides as artists, musicians, and actors. Only half of our team are computer science majors, with our collective majors encompassing theater, education, math, physics, and chemistry! We wanted to create a project that combines these diverse perspectives to create a cutesy game! One group member is a computer science and secondary math Education double major, and was inspired by the education competition category, and all the other group members were immediately drawn to the idea of creating a fun math game of some kind!

What it does

We created a fantasy-based game, where you answer questions to fight an evil monster by answering math questions! There are three game modes: time-based arithmetic, algebra, and trigonometry. You must work to reduce the monster's HP, as if you answer questions incorrectly, you will lose health yourself.

How we built it

We used Phaser.js for the first time, an open-source game-development framework that allowed us to reduce challenges that would've arisen with solely using React.js. This allowed us to test and create various 2D elements in our game. We created different pages for our site: a start page, a game page, and an end screen.

Challenges we ran into

The initial, and biggest, challenge we ran into was figuring out how to start. We were determined to create a fun, interactive game, but struggled with knowing what languages and frameworks to use. We researched what elements we wanted to implement in our game, and that's when we found Phaser.js.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of being able to create a cohesive game with various elements and cutesy designs. This was almost all of ours first hackathon, so we are very proud that we ended with a deliverable result. Our game may not be the most complex in functionality, but we hope that the coziness of our game comes through.

What we learned

We learned a lot about collaborating on one project and dividing up tasks. All of us were new to using Phaser.js, with only one team member having experience in web development and git processes. After an initial learning curve with setting up React and Git, we slowly found our groove. We also learned about maintaining our designs and functionality within the scope of the hackathon, as we had many ambitious ideas.

What's next for Critter Calculations

We want to make Critter Calculations into a fully fledged adventure game, complete with all three adventurers fighting at the same time through a dungeon full of math challenges. The hope is to make the questions applicable to the specific challenges the characters might face in a dungeon, with more complex storylines and designs! We had very thorough designers who definitely wanted more time to ensure that their art was their best. At the moment, a few designs aren't entirely complete, but the ones that are were meticulously planned and carried out by our artists. We have many hopes for our game, and plan to continue to develop this in the future as a group.

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