Inspiration
Typing in programming is an important skill - while IDE's do a lot of the syntax work for you these days, it is still important to have a good grasp on how to type common language constructs quickly! With SynType, you can become the master of typing all sorts of loops and ugly code segments with uncommon special characters.
What it does
We built a simple typing game that draws code segments from examples online - users are then prompted to type up the segments as fast as possible, also taking accuracy into account. Real-time checking is implemented so users know when they've made an error in their typing.
How we built it
SynType is built 100% with Python, using the PyGame library to implement the user interface and most of the functionality. Various online resources were used to familiarize ourselves with PyGame, as we've not worked with it before!
Challenges we ran into
Error-checking and properly highlighting the user's inputted text as correct or incorrect proved difficult. There are plenty of edge cases to consider when comparing their input to the code segment, so we spent most of our time ensuring that our program gave effective and true visual feedback to the user.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The visual display of SynType is not the most modern piece of art, but we are pretty proud of it for our lack of experience in GUI design!
What we learned
Building GUI's is no simple task- having to display the results of your algorithms to a window while running multiple game loops can get complicated, quick.
What's next for SynType
We'd love to have included a WPM and Accuracy measure at the end of each round. This feedback is important to improvement, so we definitely are looking towards adding that in the future.
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