Lost in Computation

Inspiration

The inspiration came from personal experience. As women in STEM, we wanted to create a project that celebrated and brought to light the significant contributions women before us have brought to the field of computer science.

What we learned

We feel that we most improved upon our GitHub and API skills. By working together, we were forced to commit changes and pull from GitHub often, so we were able to strengthen our skills using GitHub to the point that the workflow was natural. Beyond that, we were able to use the Gemini API key in order to generate important information related to our project, and this taught us about tokens, how to send, and how to receive information from an AI.

How we built it

Through a mixture of human input, design, and AI-assisted coding, we were able to create a website with its own domain that ran the game and displayed the information we wanted.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was connecting a personal API key to the website via Vercel in order to allow information to be generated. Another challenge was the sizing of the text got smaller as we began to add more pictures to our website, so we had to play around with the sizing settings in order to create a product that was both legible and not too large, so that the players wouldn't have to keep scrolling up and down to play. It was also a challenge to design it in a way appealing to kids, but we eventually settled on a space theme with Sparkles the unicorn.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

After a lot of research, we were able to connect the Gemini API key to the website so that Sparkles could generate information about the women we based the levels off of. We're also proud of the fact that the UI is visually appealing and catches the attention of young minds.

What we learned

We learned how to work with each other via GitHub, and how to manage the project as a team. This required us to distribute responsibility equally among team members. We also learned a lot about alpha testing our product to ensure quality.

What's next for Lost in Computation

This product could be scaled with different difficulties in order to maximize the reach by including students in higher grades. There could also be updates with more levels that teach even more concepts and more history. Finally, this product could be deployed in schools for free to inspire the next generation of STEM students.

Built With

• claude
• gemini
• node.js
• react
• typescript
• vercel