Pathview

Inspiration

Learning how to use and create algorithms not only lays a strong foundation in programming skills, but is also useful for developing logical thinking skills beyond writing computer code. With more and more tech companies leaning towards algorithmic-style interviews, our interactive can help prepare those who are job hunting. Additionally, students wanting to earn a jump start on their technical skills can use our program as a basis to achieve so. This is part of what inspired us to create this program as we wanted something that could be used in this rapidly growing industry.

What it does

Pathview is an interactive that allows the user to see and compare different pathfinding algorithms. You can add and remove obstacles, move the start and end positions, and change the algorithms at use to see how the computer adjusts.

How we built it

The entire project was created and developed in java. We implemented three different pathfinding algorithms into the interactive: A*, BFS, and DFS. We added an easy-to-use GUI so that the user could readily interact with the program. Additionally, we created a landing page where users could download, use and learn about the interactive.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we faced while creating this project was making the program respond accurately to all the user input. Additionally, implementing the three pathfinding algorithms posed a challenge since we had to make changes to the algorithms in order to make them work for our purposes.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Some accomplishments we are proud of are efficiently implementing A*, BFS, and DFS into our interactive. We are also proud of the website that we were able to create with such little experience.

What we learned

Through the development of Pathview, we furthered our knowledge on object-oriented programming as well as creating appealing platforms to demonstrate our interactive. Before starting the project, we had little knowledge on what it took to create a website, however throughout the process of creating one for Pathview, we were able to learn a lot.