EduPal

EduPal is a platform where questions, provided by an educator, are made into interactive games for students to enhance their recall and enjoyment of the class material.

Comment

Inspiration

At EduPal, we know how hard it can be to retain information from online school because of how mundane and exhausting online learning can be. We have seen the struggles of teachers, especially of elementary-school teachers, as they try to captivate and engage their restless and distracted students. We created EduPal to help teachers make learning fun and entertaining for their students, without compromising on the material being taught.

Our initial desire for this project was to create a game with a purpose. As the school year is about to start again, we realized that there is a great need for resources for teachers to improve their teaching.

What it does

Teachers provide a bank of questions and answers related to their class material. EduPal then takes those questions and implements them into a game format. Students can complete the activities, receive feedback, check their stats, and unlock avatar customizations as a reward for their progress.

How we built it

Our process started by brainstorming several plausible ideas for a meaningful game. After narrowing down our ideas, we began developing the game outline and overall framework of the visuals and UI. Our backend code uses Java and our interface is also implemented through Java and Figma. Procreate and Canva were our primary platforms for creating the graphics.

Challenges we ran into

For our project, we decided to take an ambitious approach to our coding which presented a few challenges. We wanted to push ourselves to learn as much as we could. No one on our team knew how to create a UI to allow interactions with the backend code, so a lot of time was spent on researching, consulting with mentors, and implementing our approach. Most of the challenging work was troubleshooting the GUI code we used to make it work as desired and overlaying multiple images on the GUI.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

Our team has minimal experience with UIs, yet we were able to figure out how to use Java to receive the desired inputs and to display the outputs in a visually-appealing way. Since this is uncharted territory for all of us, it was rewarding to be able to see the final product.

What we learned

Over the last 36 hours, we have each stepped outside of our realms of knowledge and learned something new. Some of us used Java GUIs for the first time, experimenting with overlaying images, text input/output, and interactive buttons. Some of us created avatar designs from scratch for the first time using Procreate. And some of us used Java to randomize and sort arrays for the first time. Along with those hard skills, we each learned how to divide and prioritize our tasks more efficiently using Trello. We are proud of the skills we are walking away with!

What's next for EduPal

In the future, we can expand the library of games available to teachers for them to create activities with. To expand the reach of this application and to make it more accessible for the users, EduPal could be made into a website available on desktop or mobile. This would also allow us to improve the UX and UI, as well as add more features such as an interactive avatar customization panel, a feedback section with games tailored to each student’s area of need, and a learning panel to allow students to reach ahead in their class material.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates