ScholarChips

ScholarChips gamifies school attendance! Teachers upload sheets, students earn virtual chips for showing up, and spend them in the Prize Shop or spin the Mystery Wheel for a chance at any prize!

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Inspiration

The theme of Las Vegas is broad, with many aiming to tackle its fields of gaming, tourism, and hospitality. Our team wanted to solve a problem that dealt more with Las Vegas's locals and how we could improve the quality of life for our community. As college students--and having experienced K-12 schooling in Nevada--supporting education for CCSD students is a personal mission, especially when they make up the 5th largest school district in the nation and top largest in NV.

What it does

ScholarChips is a gamified educational platform designed for CCSD students. Students can earn chips, our in-app currency, by engaging with educational content and activities. Those chips can then be spent in a shop to redeem prizes, or used to try their luck at a mystery prize, tying in the fun of Las Vegas culture while keeping the focus on academic engagement and rewarding students for their efforts.

How we built it

We built ScholarChips as a full-stack web application using React for the frontend, giving us a fast and dynamic user interface. On the backend, we used Node.js with Express to handle our API and server logic, and connected it to a PostgreSQL database hosted on Supabase for user data, chip balances, and prize management. Supabase also handled our user authentication, allowing students to create accounts and track their progress.

Challenges we ran into

The most persistent challenges we faced during this project dealt with the pages not working and bugs with features that previously worked before new changes were pushed. Discrepancies amongst different versions with different programmers was also an issue (ex. page works for one person, but not the other).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building a full-stack web application from the ground up in under 24 hours is something we're incredibly proud of. As first-time hackathon participants, we successfully integrated a React frontend with a backend database, implemented user authentication, and deployed multiple features including a shop and a mystery prize, all while collaborating as a team under time pressure. We're also proud of choosing a cause close to our hearts: giving back to the CCSD community we grew up in.

What we learned

Programming Takeaways: working on a single project as a team maintanenance after every merge using a React framework

Business Takeaways: time-management project-management brain-storming presentation

What's next for ScholarChips

ScholarChips was a special project to build for our first hackathon. If we were to continue working on it, we would add more features, such as additional minigames, as well as optimizing sleeker the UI and code related to login and retrieving info from the database.

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