ARIES

Final Map (referencing Marianopolis college)
Map Outline (referencing Marianopolis college)
Sprite Sheet
Announcement Board
Bookshelf

Inspiration

From our experience in online learning during high school, we faced the challenges of finding opportunities to interact with fellow peers and remain motivated to maintain academic stimulation. Upon reading MSU's challenge, we were struck with emotion and felt a heavy responsibility to create a solution for students facing the same difficulties. Inspired by the beloved game, Club Penguin, and many available online learning resources, we created our game, ARIE. ARIE, modelled after Marianopolis College, strives to change our digital landscape in the academic community; fostering inclusivity, encouraging academic success, promoting mental health, and strengthening the school community.

What it does

ARIE is an interactive, multiplayer game designed to ameliorate the interpersonal connections within Marianopolis College. Students are offered various opportunities to collaborate and share experiences, both, academic and personal.

Key features include...

Chat room: streamlines the communication between students through a shared interactive platform
Announcement board: keeps students updated on upcoming notable dates and school-wide events
QOTD (Question of the Day) board: creates an opportunity for students to practice their voice and to interact with peers by proposing discussion questions daily
Study rooms: provide a shared collaborative space for students to promote academic success; these rooms contain a multitude of tools available to enhance students' studying experience including a virtual library, homework tracker, Pomodoro timer, and background sound/visual controls

How we built it

We used Unity to code and Procreate to hand draw the entire game :D

Challenges we ran into

We initially began development using HTML but quickly realized that HTML was not suited to our needs. As a result, we decided to switch to Unity. However, this change posed challenges due to the limited time remaining.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our journey at Marihacks has been surreal, but we are so proud of our working finished product. From meticulously hand-drawing the game to relearning coding techniques, there were moments when hacking when completing the fully functional game seemed impossible. However, the past few intense hours have pushed us to delve deeper into coding, expanding our knowledge and skills.

What we learned

The entire journey was a learning experience.

What's next for ARIE

Due to time and resource constraints, our team was unable to fully integrate all the features envisioned for ARIE. Our next steps include implementing an AI teaching assistant in study rooms to support students as they tackle new and challenging concepts. Additionally, we will introduce collaborative whiteboards in study rooms to enrich the shared learning experience between students. We also plan to improve ARIE's accessibility by incorporating auto-translators, text-to-speech functionality, and screen readers.