Main Website
Live Canvas & Drawing Board
Creative Games and Idea ThinkBox
Interactive creative Games
Drawing on Canvas

☁️ Inspiration

So many people don't have access to art tools or supplies, so we decided to fix this, by creating this website.

🚧 What It Does

As said above, this website provides art tools. There are 4 tools, the live canvas, the drawing board, the games section, and the ideas section. The games and ideas section host their respective items. The drawing board, in simple words, is a non interactive canvas. The live canvas is where people can collaborate for drawings, whether it is student-teacher or friends.

🛠️ How We Built It

Using Linode's one-click stack scripts, we deployed a VPS with our database and then, hosted our backend on it. In addition to Linode, we used GitHub to host all of our code. GitHub made hosting all this a breeze. We also used Twilio for the chat app. In the chat app, the user would send the room id, and the bot would text back an image of the current drawing on the canvas (in the room).

👨🏾‍💻 Challenges We Ran Into

We had no difficulties registering a domain, or using Linode or GitHub. We had some issues using Twilio, as sometimes the MMS wouldn't work. In the end, we solved everything, and made it a success.

👍 Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

Linode's built-in stack support made it a breeze to host everything. The hosting is crucial part for our website and to avoid having a slow server that we had to run ourselves, we decided to host on the cloud, and chose Linode’s easy-to-use service to do so. This process was very streamlined and we’re proud we managed to host it on this platform.

📙 What We Learned

It was our first time using Linode and it was Super-Easy to setup and we are bound to use it in future because of its simplicity. Linode documentation is so good that we read it once and now we can use it easily to host our projects. In addition to Linode, we learned how to use Twilio. Twilio's easy-to-read documentation made it easy for us to send and receive MMS and SMS.

🔜 What's Next For Art Explorer

This project is amazing, but has a lot of points to improve upon. A better user interface can be added, and a more interactive chat bot can be "shown". The tools can have more features, too.