Solvetry

Inspiration

At Waipahu High School, Geometry is a subject that is mandatory for graduation. Through our experience taking the class, we struggled with memorizing formulas such as the area of a trapezoid, the surface area of a cube, and so on. As siblings of current Advanced Geometry students, we have heard their difficulties with these concepts as well. Because of this, we wanted to create an app to help make figures and solids easier for our siblings and other Geometry students alike.

What it does

Solvetry is a Geometry Calculator. It allows users to select from one of thirteen two-dimensional and three-dimensional figures and solids. From there, users can input the known values of the shape, such as a side length or its radius. With the click of a button, Solvetry will calculate the unknown area, volume, circumference, and/or surface area.

How we built it

We built Solvetry using MIT App Inventor. We started off by creating a visually-appealing graphical user interface. Afterwards, we began building our blocks. A ListPicker was set up to allow users to select a shape or solid, while boolean components determine the proper math features to enable for the selected figure. We then took advantage of App Inventor's math blocks to create several formulas.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into difficulties with keeping track of all the different formulas we needed for our app. This resulted in our code being messy. However, we fixed this by putting our formulas into Procedures and neatly organizing all of our Procedures in one place. This made our code significantly cleaner and easier to look at.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that our app is working effectively. We were also able to make an app together that would not only help our siblings with Geometry, but every other Geometry student as well.

What we learned

We learned how to effectively use App Inventor, how Boolean Expressions work, and the importance of understanding a client when building a solution for them. We learned how to effectively use the Engineering Design Process to create solutions in an efficient manner.

What's next for Solvetry

We hope to expand Solvetry into the subject of Trigonometry, by incorporating special right triangles, sine, cosine, and tangent functions, and a calculator for all of these values as well.

Built With

• mit-app-inventor