UpGrade

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Inspiration

Various math algorithms and formulas we could recall. We also took inspiration from the “ranked” system from popular video games and the competitive community it fosters–we really liked the idea of making learning fun in this way.

What it does

Sets up a ranked system to not only measure one’s own learning and improvement in a visual and stimulating way, but also strongly incentivise healthy competition between students to study and improve.

How we built it

We focused on fundamental principles of programming that we previously learned in a class taken here or in high school. Layers of abstractions was a really big one. We used a website called “codeHS” to make our project that we used in Highschool.

Challenges we ran into

Many UI applications–we wanted to make sure the application was easy to read and visually appealing, leading to many challenges in placement of UI elements like texts, buttons, and icons as well as the color of these elements, sizes, and fonts. We also ran into some trouble with the application of the math formulas we applied, being that translating them practically into JavaScript proved challenging at times.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are most proud of the dedication we put towards this project. From the start, we were very excited once we had the idea however, soon we realized that we might’ve fallen for scope creep and put too many planned features on our plate. However, in the end, we really focused and locked-in, adding almost every feature we wanted to, which we are both very satisfied and proud of as a result. Also the background music is fully composed by us and we are proud of it.

What we learned

We learned how to design game mechanics to ensure the students have a fair and positive experience instead of taking shortcuts and cheating. We also improved our skills in JavaScript and learned to create a UI system to accurately reflect the in-game data, and learned to fix UI scaling issues.

What's next for UpGrade

In the future, we would like to integrate the option to compare ranks and points with your friends and classmates. This way, we can keep students engaged by promoting healthy competition and have them strive for success. Furthermore, we would like to be able to input real test score data from real students instead of generating it to have a more accurate median and comparison. Lastly, adding more different types of background music would add more customizability to the app.

Built With

• codehs
• javascript