Donate Donut

example of donuts generated in program with background color set to white
drawing of a flower with donuts in Donate Donut
part of the code used to create Donate Donut

Inspiration 💡

Our inspiration for this was thinking about the problems in our community. Often, when we are on the highway, we see many tents and trash scattered around them. We want to give the homeless "another chance" at life and raise money and awareness for their situation.

What it does 🍩💲

The game is designed to bring awareness to the homeless in a fun way. Players can team up with their friends by sending them the link to the game, and try to see how many donuts they can generate by clicking the screen. Each donut is "one dollar" (not real money), and while the players try to earn as much money as they can, facts will appear on the bottom of the screen. They will be able to test their multi-tasking skills by trying to memorize the facts and click at the same time. At the end of the game, there will be a mini quiz to see how much they were able to learn, and depending on how many questions they get correct, they will get a certain amount of bonus money! We've also provided some organizations where they can donate real money to help the homeless. 🍩WARNING WARNING: HANDS MAY BE TIRED AFTER PLAYING THIS GAME CONTINUOUSLY, SO GET READY TO EXCERSIZE YOUR HAND MUSCLES, TOO🍩

How we built it 🔨

Our whole program was built on replit using the language Python and other libraries like Pygame. We used while loops to check when the mouse clicks to draw a donut with the same coordinates so that when a player clicks the screen, they will see a donut appear. This is the foundation of our game, and from there, we started adding the details. For example, we made the donuts change colors randomly using the random.randint() function from the random library, and allowed the player to choose the background color using if clauses. We also added other things like a time limit for the game using the pygame.time.get_ticks() function, score keeping by adding a “dollar” to our score-keeping variable each time the user clicks on the screen, facts to raise awareness using the print function, and a quiz at the end using input and print functions as well as if clauses to check the answers. Directions were added at the end when our program was pretty much done so it didn't need to be continuously edited. We would like to thank the websites that we used to help with some of the code, and also the coaches in Coding Club for the help and resources who helped us a lot! ♥

Challenges we ran into 😭

While making our program, we faced many challenges. First, we had to decide what program to use in order to be able to code together as a team. Replit wasn't working with pygame, so we decided to use another platform to code on. However, we discovered that pygame didn't work on there either since it appeared that we didn't download pygame even though we did. So, we tried switching back to Replit to see if pygame worked on a home computer. Luckily, it did, and we were able to work together on the same code, as well. Another one of the major technical difficulties that we faced was at the end, when we were almost done with our project. For some reason, Replit glitched and deleted almost half of our code. We tried recovering it, but that didn't work either, since every time it "recovered", the code didn't change at all. We had to spend an extra half an hour re-coding/typing all of it, since we were able to see the original code but not directly recover it (and no, copy and paste didn't work because it started copying everything else and not just the code). Then, our tab keys started malfunctioning and we weren't able to format anything for a little while (for some reason it only didn't work on replit). Through all of this, we were able to get back to where we were and finish coding the program.

Accomplishments that we're proud of 🙌🏻

We are proud of making it through all of the technical difficulties and the perseverance that that took. At times, we got really frustrated for various reasons, but we were still able to make a program that we think will help our community. We also learned many things while making this, like discovering that you are able to delay the printing of a string by a certain amount of time, and some general things you can do in pygame. There are also things we learned that aren't related to coding, like perseverance (as mentioned above), and how to work together as a team to solve a problem. This has been a truly awarding experience for all of us :D.

What we learned 🏫

We learned many things that have to do with both coding and life skills in general. Since our program uses pygame, we were able to learn more about how to make a game with that. We also learned about the practical uses of some interesting things you can do with code, like delaying the printing of a string or changing the color of the background. Some of the life skills we learned are perseverance, team-work, and communication skills.

What's next for Donate Donut ⏭

If we were given more time to work on this, we would create a website for the game. There would also be some things we would change in the game, like making the fun-facts more visible or having a notification pop up when a fun-fact is printed so that the player knows, and making this an official two-player game where two people can compete against each other in the actual game and not just by comparing scores. We hope that our game can inspire some people to donate money to help the homeless or create a program themselves that raises awareness for them.