Source My SMS

Python using SMS
Meowscript using SMS

Our Focus

Education: We plan on having this project focus on not just what it is, itself, but what it means for evolving programming education in the future.

Inspiration

We were inspired by the simplicity and abstractness of the programming language BF we wanted to create something that had similar functionality but easier to use. We also wanted to make it super unique so we decided the only way a user can run their code is via SMS messages, so we settled on creating a system that allows users to create their own programming language that was accessible via text message.

What it does

Our project lets you run our custom scripting language that you run from SMS on your phone. Our demo uses one that we made called Meow Script. Meow Script is a turning complete programming language that has keywords of different variations of "meow". We additionally provided some python examples to show how much more powerful how project could be in the future. Demo Video

What this means

This project has the possibility to help students engage in learning programming. This has the ability to simplify preexisting code structures and making them tangible for beginners to learn. i.e. Not many beginners in C are going to understand what

#include <stdio.h>

means, but a lot more beginners are going to understand that their code needs to start with a "header". We built that functionality, and this type of language can be modified by an educator to specify exactly what a student needs to focus on. This also allows educators to slowly "take off the training wheels" and ease them into traditional programming languages. However, this doesn't just stop at the learning stage of programming, these keywords can be used as customizable macros to allow for simplified and efficient programming for even the most skilled of programmers.

How we built it

We used Twilio to allow us to get user input. This input is then computed with our backend. MeowScript, itself, was built using C.

Challenges we ran into

We had a hard time setting up Twilio to get the user commands. We also had trouble getting to send messages back to the users. Finally getting the C code to work with different cases was a troubling task.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of getting the Twilio to work and allowing users to input text. Getting to see the C code to work made us really happy.

What we learned

We learned how to handle flow of users depending on what message they send us, and what exactly compromises a programming language.

What's next for Source My SMS

We are going to implement better functionality with creating original programming languages (with emphasis on creating teacher-and-student-specialized educational languages) and implementing more previously existing languages for people to use via SMS.