Inspiration
As kids who were born in the late 2000s, we grew up around early educational games like Cool Math Games and ABCya. Those definitely played a role in how we instantly thought of an educational game to fit the hackathon theme. For Michelle specifically, she was inspired by a math game that allowed players to earn gems on an app called Gacha Life... she was a Gacha kid in fifth grade.
What it does
Alpha Adventures has four stages: Omega Wolf, Beta Wolf, Alpha Wolf, and Apex Wolf. It goes from simple math to Algebra 1 to Algebra 2 to a final stage with challenging Algebra 2 questions (Apex Wolf). Answering questions correctly awards you points, and you need 7 points per stage to move on to the next. Each wolf is worth one point - except the final boss for each stage, which is worth two.
How we built it
After discussing some basic details about our educational game, Yumi wrote down a template for code before using Python on Replit.
Challenges we ran into
Sometimes the code wouldn't work, which was frustrating and took a lot of time to fix. We had to sacrifice certain parts of our game that we couldn't get to run. Especially during the later stages of our project, when Michelle had already written down removed features on our slides, she would have to go back and record a newly edited part of the presentation.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of ourselves for participating in our first hackathon and entering something before the deadline. We're also proud of how we persevered and kept fixing our project, no matter how many tries we took.
What we learned
We learned what hackathons are like and are now prepared for our next ones. We also now know to check our code carefully and to plan out when we should record our slideshows, to prevent wasting time by going back and re-recording everything when something changes.
What's next for Alpha Adventures
We hope it becomes an alternative to Prodigy, which has essentially turned into a pay-to-win game. We want to keep ours free and simple, so as to positively impact kids by installing a love for math in them.
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