Forestudy

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  forestudy

Inspiration

We wanted to encourage people to enjoy studying, since as university students, we found that we sometimes struggled to maintain motivation to prepare for assignments/tests. Using this ‘gamified’ approach to learning, we hope that more students can be engaged and motivated to actively participate in their studies.

What it does

Forestudy (Forest + Study) is an application that allows you to input your own questions and answers (including a randomly generated set, ‘Maths Mode’), which you can practice in the form of a simple game. The main premise of Forestudy is to incorporate interactive elements by testing the user on their study card in order to make studying a more appealing experience.

How we built it

We chose to build our game in Pygame for two main reasons. Pragmatically, we were the most familiar with python as first year students, and it seemed the most realistic within the short time frame of the hackathon.

Additionally, we thought that the library would help us implement features typical of games to try and present studying as an exciting, interactive experience. We used it for graphics and user interaction such as user input boxes when answering flashcards, handling animation logic for character movements and loading images and fonts for the content.

Lastly, we utilized JSON files for initially storing questions and answers provided by the user in a dictionary.

Challenges we ran into

None of us had used the Pygame library before, so we had to learn the features of this new library and the graphic interface. We faced initial difficulty in converting the back-end python code into a usable interface due to our lack of experience: a lot of the initial code was redundant as it could not easily be converted to be displayed on the UI. There was also difficulty in integrating the individual components and game modes into one individual executable file, specifically in navigating between the different modes/files. Another issue was related to the scope of variables which became very hard when dealing with integrating normal python logic into pygame.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Even though our project is far from perfect, we are happy that it functions and receives and reacts to user input, since this is our first hackathon.

What we learned

We learnt the basics of the Pygame library, as well the strategies of building up a larger scale process. Through the difficulties that we faced, we learnt the importance of thorough planning and task delegation.

What's next for Forestudy

We would like to strengthen the ‘gaming’ aspect of our Program. For example, the implementation of a saved progression system for a user would likely increase the willingness of the user to return to the app. We would also like to add in some more modes, such as a multiple choice mode (with the possibility of other options being AI generated) as well as a wider variety of automatically generated decks over different subjects.

Built With

• pygame
• python