drankhangan

Our idea is to get people to learn new Dutch words that are voted by Nederlanders to be added into the Van Dale dictionary in a fun and confusing way. We think "dat is goed idee"!!!

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Inspiration

Initially we wanted to build a simple full-stack quiz app so that we could all learn new technologies in the form of javascript frameworks and Django. While searching for inspiration one of our team members discovered that Dutch words of the year tended to be very peculiar and interesting compared to words of the year in other languages, for example in the case of the word swaffelen, and we decided to share this with others through the quiz app. We were hoping that the quiz could help people remember these words to be used as new interesting talking points and maybe to be integrated into daily lexicon as a way for readers to sound more cultured. However, upon further research within the Hack&Roll2020 period, we realised that the Dutch words of the year are might in fact not an actual Dutch words, but rather new words coined by people influenced by current events locally in the Netherlands and also globally. We realised that it would be funny if people were to assume that all of these words were dutch words and be called out for using fake-Dutch by people who actually spoke Dutch, and maybe in the process mutate the English and Dutch language if enough people were to be influenced by our project.

For example,

facebookmoord: Facebook murder; inspired by the Dutch teen murder scandal

swaffelen: to slap someone with a penis (Dutch WOTY 2008)

flitsmarathon: a day when police are intensely checking the speed of drivers

These new non-official words would then be selected by the leading dictionary of the Dutch language, Van Dale's Great Dictionary of the Dutch Language, and they will host a voting competition for the Dutch people to vote for their favourite Dutch word of the year. The winning word will then be officially added to the dictionary, which is honestly very cool and interesting.

What it does

The quiz tests if you can get the "fake" Dutch words correct by looking at their definitions or real-life event influences behind the words. This quiz is meant to be challenging since most of us are not familiar with Dutch and their unique morphology. We also want this quiz app to be fun so we included some unexpected elements in the scoring system and remaining lives counter.

How we built it

We used the VueJs framework for the frontend and Django for the backend.

Challenges we ran into

Debugging and deployment. Pain of debugging. We had many problems in the beginning partially due to our inexperience and also due to the lack of a clear "game plan". However, as we used and learnt more about the technologies we were using, we were able to implement our ideas faster which led to minor adjustments to our original app idea.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successfully managed to integrate Vue.js with Django after multiple hurdles as it was our first time working a front-end framework with a back-end one together. We also successfully deployed our web app live using DigitalOcean.

What we learned

Other than familiarising ourselves with the languages and frameworks that we used in the creation of our application, we also learnt about never giving up. There was a point in time where we were certain that we weren't able to present a complete application or even a working prototype. However, due to sheer determination, masterful google and a little luck, we were able to solve our problems nearing the final hours of the hackathon.

What's next for drankhangan

Same concept for other languages such as German! We can venture more into mobile application development to enhance the suitability of this quiz on mobile devices. Our web app quiz works on mobile devices but the interface don't look great on mobile devices. This part requires more improvement so this is why we consider mobile application development next.

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