Back to School with COVID-19

Title Scene
Washing Hands!
Lunch Time
Social Distancing
Java Code using the Processing Library
Incomplete drawing of Stacy in Krita

Inspiration

Both of us have cousins and younger siblings that are returning back to school during the COVID-19 pandemic. We both know the difficulties of getting young children to retain "boring" information such as procedures. We wanted to create an interactive game to help young students better remember COVID-19 safety procedures.

What it does

Our project is a game for young students and children to learn about the necessary precautions to take when going back to school when the COVID-19 pandemic is still happening. It follows a young girl named Sarah as she prepares for COVID-19 at home and how she interacts safely with other students at her school.

How we built it

We built this app with Java using the Processing graphic library. In addition, many of the items and all the characters were drawn by hand on Krita as well. For the background music that is heard in the game, we imported the sound library from Processing in order to play it.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest challenge we ran into was figuring out how to code this project. We were thinking of making an informational website, but thought that a game would be much more helpful in getting children to retain the information.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are so proud to have accomplished such a great-looking and easy-to-use game for all students to use and we are excited to we have coded more than nine fully interactive scenes which make students care about Sarah and empathize with her as she goes throughout her day with this pandemic going on.

What we learned

Not only did we learn more about coding and how to create a game that can also educate, but also entertain students, we learned much more about COVID-19 and the precautions and challenges students face when going back to school.

What's next for Back to School with COVID-19

We hope to continue to improve back to school with COVID-19 to make it more accessible, informational, and even more straightforward. Since this game was coded on Processing, it is extremely intuitive to convert this code into p5.js and use this script to input the game into a website. After the website is created with the game, we hope to send this to schools in our community, our city and even our country so that these schools are equipped with technology to effectively teach kids how to be safe in school and overall public areas. Additionally, As safety guidelines for going back to school during COVID-19 continue to evolve, we plan to update this game to better reflect updated guidelines.