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Game Page
Inspiration
As students learning to code, we realized that writing clean and efficient code isn't just about the syntax. Clean and efficient code comes from patterns and intuition, often times beginners struggle with recognizing these patterns so we wanted to create a fun and interactive way to train this skill.
Additionally, we were inspired by the concept of "productive failure", which was briefly mentioned at the entrance ceremony, where research suggests the optimal learning rate is ~15%. That's why garbagecode.study isn't about getting everything right, its about recognizing mistakes and improving.
Beyond just coding skills, garbagecode.study also draws a parallel between programming and sustainability to the environment. Bad code wastes computing resources just like how bad waste management harms the planet.
What it does
garbagecode.study is a web app that transforms the way students code. Instead of passive tutorials, our game-based learning approach rewires your brain to intuitively detect clean and efficient programming patterns.
Using code snippets from relevant and clean code from stack overflow and Claude 3.7, we ensure the user is exposed to a wide variety of clean/relevant code. We made sure all the prompts that were approved had an intermediately challenging difficulty and we made sure there was a variety of pseudo languages, including Java, Python, C++, C#, C, JavaScript and even esoteric programming languages such as brainfuck or fish.
How we built it
garbagecode.study was built with a laser focus on simplicity, intuitive UI, speed and scalability.
Our major focus on simplicity was for people to just go on the website with no login and get straight to quizes, with a very simple data saving features done through the browser. We designed this lightweight web app to run entirely in the browser, meaning zero dependencies, zero backend complexity, instant access and with our logic being pure JavaScript.
Challenges we ran into
Building garbagecode.study in 36 hours, we faced a lot of challenges, especially because we're not the greatest developers.
Some of the most difficult challenges were making sure the javascript logic would always give at least one correct code snippet, making sure that the game logic would give you some feedback when you got something wrong, and trying to add a trained ai model to generate dynamic new code snippets which we eventually gave up on.
Also on Saturday we kind of got lost outside trying to buy food and we wasted like 3 hours charging our phones so we can use google maps to get back, that was a pretty big challenge we faced.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
This was our first time hosting something on vercel and buying a domain from godaddy which is pretty cool.
I was also very happy when I got the JavaScript code snippet logic to work, I think that took me the most time out of anything.
What we learned
How to use JavaScript, HTML, CSS and hosting.
We also don't develop websites a lot so the JavaScript game logic we wrote was definitely a learning experience.
This was my first time hosting a site as well and it's a lot easier than I thought it would be.
What's next for Garbage Code
-Training a garbagecode.study AI model to generate code snippets with the stupid format I used. -Adding login and backend servers to graph data on how well someone is learning and doing problems -Integrating an AI model to generate new questions every time -Actually having someone who knows how to do front end on the team.
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