Inspiration
Our inspiration was derived from the fact that, as students who are in grade 12, studying is often extremely boring. It consists of sitting at a desk and reviewing facts or redoing the same problems, over and over again. The academic system itself is based upon these metrics of success, so we wondered, “What if there was another way?” This, in the same way that all great philosophies start, was the foundation of our project. We wanted a way to make studying captivating and give rewards to students as they progress.
What it does
RPGenius enables its users to study in a more rewarding and effective way. It combines aspects from role-playing games and the progression levels that they provide along with an emphasis on studying. Through the RPGenius in-game progression model students are heavily encouraged to study more to get more rewards. The way this works is that with RPGenius user’s gain experience levels and coins over time. At a certain threshold once the user has reached a certain experience level they level up while user’s gain coins every ten seconds. With coins user’s can purchase different backgrounds for their in-game character and study music. Furthermore, with certain levels being achieved user’s gain access to different skins. Both of these accessories/vanity items encourage students to study more. Furthermore, there is a quiz feature at the bottom of the page which allows users to make their own test question study sets. Once a user has performed a test that they have created they get additional coins.
How we built it
We built this project using a variety of ideas and topics. As we had a larger team, we could more freely focus on the artistic side of things, so we had members making music, others doing pixel art, and then some who were coding as necessary. The program itself is based in React, a popular framework for the three web development languages, with the usage of Tailwind CSS, TypeScript, and other items. Specifically, we used the T3 stack to develop our app and deployed it using Vercel.
Challenges we ran into
There was a massive hurdle early on in the project, namely that we tried to use an API to access Google Sheets. However, this process was incredibly difficult and, as a result, we weren’t able to implement it successfully. With this, we had to reorient the main purpose of our project into something different than its original intention many hours into the competition. Furthermore, having additional members resulted in a little bit of latency and confusion in terms of who should be doing which part of the project.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
In terms of our accomplishments, we succeeded in scaling up our Hackathon team in membership. We expected this to have some challenges, as our teams prior to this were either 3 or 4 members, so a little bit of slowness was anticipated. However, we found that we worked surprisingly well together, with each member adapting themselves to work on a particular piece of the project. Furthermore, we made an end product that looks and sounds great in under 24 hours, which is an accomplishment we can all agree is impressive.
What we learned
We learned that things won't always go according to plan and that it’s important to be well-prepared. Many pieces of software were learned on the spot, and fortunately we had enough time to learn how to work with these, but this won’t always be the case. Furthermore, it’s okay if the process of making a project changes over time, or if the end project becomes different than what it was meant to be. This is all part of the creative process. Finally, having a central design when the project is started is necessary, because there was some confusion between team members as to what we should do at various points in time. Something was eventually put together, however it took time to reach that point.
What's next for RPGenius
What would be nice is having a form of interactivity between students and teachers, in which the students could join a class and receive coins or experience points based on their quiz marks as well as the time they’ve elapsed studying. The original plan was to follow this concept, however as it was more complicated than originally intended, we plan to add it as a future implementation. Class codes would allow students to compete with each other to maximize their personal gains in the game, which would give incentives to study and become the best. Teachers would benefit from having their students do work and become more studious. It’s a win-win!
Built With
- css3
- html5
- javascript
- react
- t3
- tailwind
- typescript
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