Puzzle Reader

Today's digital age is saturated with social media and distractions—kids rarely read anymore. Puzzle Reader makes reading fun again by allowing readers to document books with an online bookshelf!

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Inspiration

As older siblings, my partner and I realized that there's been a noticeable decrease in reading this generation. With so much technology, students, kids, and adults rarely find an incentive to read anymore. We wanted to make an app for people to share their books so reading can be more fun and interactive.

What it does

Our app allows the reader to create a digital bookshelf. Readers can:

  • Keep track of books you've read and are currently reading
  • Create personalized bookshelves with customizable names and book covers
  • Maintain records of books by typing a quick summary and giving books a rating
  • Sharing books with friends by referring them to this website

How we built it

We built it using Django and Python in the backend in order to add functionality to our app. For the front-end we used HTML, Javascript and CSS.

Challenges we ran into

We started as a team of 4 people, but on Saturday, 1 of our teammates backed. We were left to finish the app by ourselves. It was definitely a really stressful challenge and we didn’t expect it, but with the help of our amazing mentors (Sudhish, Patrick, and more) we finished our prototype!

Yufei didn't have any much experience with Django so she had to learn the technology in 36 hours. The learning curve was difficult because it was hard to implement all the features we desired so we ended up dropping a few features. But, in the end, the prototype worked out well!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We worked together despite our teammate dropping out at the very last moment. We were able to prototype a portable app.

What we learned

We experienced new technologies with Django and got to know that we are determined after coming through different types of circumstances.

What's next for Puzzle Reader

We think that adding user accounts might be a good idea so people can save their books that they have read. Another thing is creating a comment section where the creators and the users could interact, like using feedback on what was good in the website and what could be improved upon.

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