RaceTyper

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  The first time our program ran successfully- needless to say, tears were shed.

Inspiration

This truly is the culmination of college students trying to have some fun while learning something new. A couple of guys chatting over Discord about what kind of project best fit us as first-time hackathon attendees resulted in a number of ideas to sift through before ultimately deciding on this one. However, determined not to do something generic, we settled on the idea that we believed would teach us the most, hopefully stand out as somewhat unorthodox as well as be the most enjoyable to work on.

What it does

RaceTyper is an interactive text-based game that is implemented directly on the command line. Its purpose is to teach kids how to type (a skill that is borderline essential for life in the 21st century!) Running the program prompts the user with detailed instructions to get the game up and running. The objective of the game is to type out the lines printed onto the screen verbatim until reaching the end, as quickly and as accurately as possible. It provides a built-in paragraph editor for users to change what they would like to type. The end of the program returns feedback as well as a score, providing for an arcade-style sense of competition and replayability factor.

How we built it

What began as a humble sales app quickly pivoted into what is now RaceTyper. Starting from nothing but a pool of ideas from spitballing, we ultimately decided on something that we would do something that was personally engaging to all of us and something we could get excited about. Kind of winging it as we went, we slowly molded the program into a recognizable shape, putting a specific focus on encapsulation and the main tenets of "clean code". This saved us an incredible amount of headache down the road.

Challenges we ran into

There are too many to count, ranging from minute to massive 15-error bugs, but each one was both frustrating and incredibly satisfying to resolve.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The implementation of the file I/O system originally started out as a stretch goal that we would have to work through painstakingly since none of our team members were comfortable with the topic. We haphazardly created a method and commented it out out of fear that it would crash our program only to discover at the end that we had accomplished the task on the very first try! It was a fantastic feeling.

What we learned

Working on this project was unexpectedly enlightening in that it really opened my eyes to the power and applications of object-oriented programming beyond what was taught in the academic landscape. It solidified the core concepts Java for me and helped give me insight into what the software development cycle is really like with time constraints and the like.

What's next for RaceTyper

Although the hackathon is over, our team is still enthusiastic about adding to and polishing the central idea that we have already. Among the features we hope to flesh out in the future are:

• A GUI implementation to make things even easier for users to understand
• Quality of life improvements such as a WPM at the end as well as a Report card summarizing how well the user did
• More text and art to make things more eye-catching

Built With

• java