Preschool Bingo

Inspiration

My daughter's preschool teacher asked for a program to help her class . She wanted to let the kids see what letters she had called for their bingo boards, since not all preschoolers can identify a letter by its name. She uses a pen that simulates a mouse click to select things on her SmartBoard, so she wanted something that reacted to a mouse click.

What it does

The program starts with all the images being pictures of something that starts with the letter. This lets the teacher know where to click to show the letter. As she calls letters, she can click each picture and change it to the letter. The letters can be shown as upper case or lower case. The letter style can be changed midway through the game without resetting the board, via mouse click or keystroke. The entire program can be run with only a keyboard, only a mouse, or a combination of both.

How we built it

Melissa took care of the art files while I wrote the program. She was a wonderful asset to bounce ideas off of when I ran into coding challenges. I used JavaFX to code the program. I used a class to create objects for each letter, which held all of their images.

Challenges we ran into

The first challenge that we ran into was getting the images to display on the board. JJ with Cerner was a great help in fixing the problem. It turns out that I had accidentally added an s to the end of my image folder. We tried to make the window resizable, but couldn't get all the assets to bind together properly. They wouldn't change size as the window changed size. We also ran into the challenge of the submission's website not taking .bmp files for upload.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We finished the project with time to spare. We were able to go back through our images, tweaking them as needed. We were also able to add keyboard functionality to the program that wasn't planned in the beginning.

What we learned

We learned that without good art assets, you can't have a aesthetically pleasing program. We also learned that sometimes it is the smallest things that hold up a project for hours and a fresh set of eyes can help find those things.