Math Connect Four

Inspiration

Our younger siblings and cousins have been struggling with education during the pandemic due to lack of focus or motivation to learn. We wanted to make a change and do something about this, so we made a game that would teach them at the same time.

What it does

Our program is like connect four, but it incorporates mathematics. The way it works is before a player can put a chip in, they must get a math question correct first. We have questions of varying difficulty for different grade levels, going from kindergarten to fifth grade.

How we built it

We used java to code this project, and used ANSI to put colors in it. We had different files for different class groups, a Main.java to run it, ConnectFour.java to run the Connect Four game, and Grades.java to do the math for the different grades.

Challenges we ran into

This was our first time using colors in java, so it was hard to get a sufficient understanding of ANSI in order to make this project work. Also, we struggled in integrating the grades into the connect four class, since there were many different objects we had to create. Lastly, we had many visual errors and it took many different trials to fix them all.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to make a connect four board that looked aesthetically pleasing. This was our first Hackathon, so completing a project and turning it in is an accomplishment for us. We have never had a large group project before, so our communication and collaboration was impressive enough to run into few errors when combining the sections into the larger code.

What we learned

We learned how to incorporate colors in java, and how to truly integrate parent and child classes in a program. We also learned that we want to do more Hackathons in the future because this definitely helped our coding skills in general, while being a lot of fun.