Lightning Chemistry

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  LightningChemistryLogo

Inspiration - for a software engineering class (SE 185) at Iowa State University an online textbook is used called zybooks by zyante that is more of an integrated web learning environment. It uses a combination of reading passages, multiple choice, animated graphics, and an IDE that checks output to teach the programming language C. As a programmer, chemistry is not always a strong suit and with taking it simultaneously with the course SE 185, it made sense to develop something that would be an aide in the class.

What it does - This program begins with a foundation chapter, learning significant figures. It combines reading quizzes to check your understanding by randomly generating numbers for practice problems. You can complete an infinite number of practice problems that will be different each time and explain the answer behind it.

How we built it - Using Xcode and Apple's programming language Swift. We created plain text descriptions of algorithms used in chemistry and implemented them in our code.

Challenges we ran into - Trying to do too much at once, learning Swift, debugging, app crashing -- essentially there were a lot of challenges we ran into, but were able to overcome them and make a running app :)

Accomplishments that we're proud of - We are most proud of the fact that coming into hackathon we had 0 to little knowledge of swift and throughout the course of the weekend we were able to utilize the internet and the collaboration with the mentors from several different sponsors to make something great!

What we learned - We learned a lot about teamwork, setting reasonable goals: Do we want it, do we need it, or is it cool? , utilizing internet resources to learn about a programming language, debugging skills increased significantly, networking skills, tons of cool info about our sponsors and attending companies!

What's next for Lightning Chemistry -- Lightning Chemistry started with an important foundation -- significant figures. What's to come next is vocabulary readings and quizzes, chemical nomenclature test (naming of compounds), periodic table , rules of ionization -- essentially more of the fundamentals of chemistry, and eventually really getting into the various calculations!

Built With

• ios
• swift
• xcode