YarnSpin

Inspiration

The camping theme of HackBeanpot reminded Dayton of campfire stories, and this app could enable campfire story-like activities while social distancing!

What it does

Our concept of YarnSpin allows multiple people on multiple devices to collaborate on a story in fun virtual rooms, and then export those stories or share them with others in the app. Over the course of this hackathon we've built a wireflow in Figma and a proto-prototype Android application.

How we built it

Taking into consideration everyone's capabilities, the designers of the team (Alice and Tanya) fleshed out the concept in Figma with input from the others, and then Dayton implemented a proto-prototype of it in Android Studio.

Challenges we ran into

Since we started with a concept but nothing concrete, fleshing out the scope of our project based on our team's skills and the timeframe took time. We are also all first time hackathon attendees, and so this was doubly difficult. Dayton had trouble with fragments in the development of the Android app, and the timeframe limited our final product. And, of course, the virtual nature of the hackathon made coordinating meetings and touching base with each other more inconvenient.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We all learned a lot, and pushed ourselves outside of our comfort zones. For example, Alice hadn't designed for an Android app before, Euann was unfamiliar with both Figma and Android development, and all of us are first time hackathon attendees. We're proud of how far we got with YarnSpin; seeing the idea form with input from everyone, and then take shape, was awesome.

What we learned

See above!

What's next for YarnSpin

Further work on YarnSpin would include getting to full functionality on the Android app, like implementing the story creation; room creation (timers, limit number of rounds or words, type of story creation, etc.); the social media aspect; and finalizing the navigation. We also came up with a game mode that would take user-created stories, take out random words, and ask players to input words for those parts of speech in a Mad-Libs style. We lacked the NLP skills to identify parts of speech this hackathon, but it might be fun to implement in the future!

Our team is Alice, Tanya Kler, Dayton Wilson, Euann Gu, and Lana. We did not quite finish!

Built With

• android-studio
• figma
• java