The Starnator 9000

Inspiration

Whenever I get bored in class I start forming circles with dots and connecting them in many different ways. After one or two times, the circle starts becoming much more interesting and it ends up looking totally stunning and nothing like one would imagine in the first place.

What it does

It plots n (inputted by the user) dots equally apart in a circle. After this the user decides how he or she wants to connect the dots, what colors they want the lines, how big and where he or she wants the "Star" to be. After repeating this process with different values one or two times, the shapes seem to combine in a very visually appealing way. This allows for endless possibilities when looking to form complex patterns with The Starnator 9000.

How we built it

In order to be able to separate every dot from the vertex with equal distance, we had to compute a mathematical algorithm to be able to get the coordinates of n points, all apart from each other by the same distance, as well as being equally apart from the vertex. After this, we create two arrays and give the x values of the coordinates to one, while giving the y values to another, allowing us to connect them later in a much simpler way.

Challenges we ran into

Because the team was made up of somewhat novice programmers, we wanted to learn something new. This is why we decided to create the program in html and java-script, both being languages who none of us had studied before. This, being something that we wanted, also brought us many challenges, because none of us were used to the syntax of such languages. Although we struggled we managed to break through every obstacle by researching online and discussing what we thought of each scenario thoroughly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are all very proud not only of learning the bases of two totally different languages to the ones we knew, but of being able to go above and beyond our original idea by being able to leave it to the user where exactly he or she wants the shapes at, as well as the size and color. Even when we had thought we could not add anything more, we decided not to stop and continue coding, by turning our program into a functional android application.

What we learned

Like mentioned before, we are all very proud to have learned the html and java-script languages together, helping others when we felt comfortable, while feeling confident enough to ask others about topics we did not feel so good about too.

What's next for The Starnator 9000

Because of the stunning amount of positive feedback we have gotten from other groups, we have decided to publish the program online, giving the whole world access to our program. We look forward to finding new ways we can make our program much better, and of course, implementing those changes in order to continue learning these languages and making our great application even better..