Gaming4Good

Inspiration

Over the course of the pandemic, learning was hindered, collaboration was affected, and the overall experience of school wasn’t the same. Virtual school made it exponentially harder for students to remain focused in class, and the effects of the pandemic in terms of reducing focus are still being felt even post-virtual learning. We’ve noticed that students are significantly more addicted to their phones and find it harder to resist the ongoing distractions during class such as texts, snaps, and news notifications. According to healthline.com, experts say that there's been an increase in evaluations and diagnosis of ADHD in children as they adjust to remote learning. We have an app that aims to help increase a student’s attention span and help increase focus.

What it does

Our app solves the ongoing problem of students not being able to focus, especially those with ADHD. We want to slowly and steadily increase their attention span through fun and interactive games. Though we have only demonstrated one of the levels of this app, with more time, we would expand this to multiple levels. Each level will be successively harder than the other and a student should play level daily to consistently address the problem.

Our project solves this problem by presenting the user with a maze which they have to escape from. The game itself is in an “escape room” format where the user will navigate through the maze and solve logic puzzles to find their way out of the maze. Once the user can escape the maze, the level is considered “complete” and the player shall receive keys. This game will encourage users to solve riddles with increasing difficulty to escape each room. These are skills that are challenging for them to do naturally but can be improved with practice.

How we built it

Our project is coded using Flask, HTML, JavaScript, and a small portion has Python. The game board design used tools from Canva. We also used Bootstrap’s framework for web design including components for the Navbar.

Challenges we ran into

Debugging! We faced many careless syntax errors as well as logic errors with functions navigating to wrong places. For debugging we used strategies like commenting out parts of the code to find where the issue is. We also struggled integrating a Python backend with an HTML frontend. Alternatively, we decided to use JavaScript and HTML to keep the application entirely on the frontend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the end product and our ability to problem solve and adapt despite the challenges faced. Also, we were able to implement JavaScript, a language we aren't familiar with in just 2 days.

What we learned

We learned how to think strategically while debugging using techniques like commenting out parts of the code to find where the error originates. We also learned how to collaborate and capitalize on each other's strengths.

What's next for Gaming4Good

We could hire a software developer to execute on feature ideas we have to expand our market. For example, we could add different types of games, a progress tracker, a timer to count minutes of focus, and a prize system. We could also fund research to test the effectiveness of our app and improve accordingly.