SpaceAce

Home screen with music
Sample question
Sample answer with "Tell Me More" popup highlighted
Web Page popup with more information

Inspiration

We figured we could branch both the “Entertainment” and “Education” themes of this year’s LA Hacks with a trivia game. Inspired by the recent developments with spaceflight (see: Elon Musk sending an entire car to Mars), we decided to go for space-themed questions.

What it does

SpaceAce is a trivia game that educates the player about space. After the user attempts to answer each question, they are told whether they were correct; they are then prompted to learn more about the topic, or to move on to the next question. If the user decides to learn more, they will be redirected to the webpage of an article on the topic of the question. Once the user answers all the questions, they are greeted with a end screen and prompted to play again

How we built it

We built it using Android Studio. The majority of the program was written in Java; the UI was built with Android Studio’s native UI editor.

Challenges we ran into

The majority of our group had never programmed in Java before, so we had the hurdle of learning a new language. We also encountered various problems with GitHub, as we used Git Bash to manually perform version control instead of Android Studio’s VCS, which was too confusing. As a result, we had to learn to deal with push/pull/merge conflicts, create and restore from backup branches, and manage the panic that comes from a working commit suddenly deciding to crash.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was our first hackathon, and none of us had any app development experience. The fact that we were able to learn Android Studio/Java from scratch, and take an app from concept to final product all within this short time span, is something we’re immensely proud of.

What we learned

How to plan and execute an idea that is within the scope of our abilities, or abilities that we could feasibly learn
How to collaborate on a group programming project given time constraints and limited experience
How important sleep is
Github version control
Android Studio
Java

What's next for SpaceAce

Randomize questions and answer options
Increase the variety and quantity of questions/topics
Include a second “learn” mode that categorizes all the terms/topics used in the app with links to further reading, so that users can read about them directly without playing the game

Built With

Submitted to

LA Hacks 2018

Created by

I contributed to writing the code for questions and linking pages together.

This was my first hackathon and my first experience with git and android studio/Java. This project was a lot of fun in completing and I learned a lot.

Denil Poudel
I worked on part of the game logic and the transitions between question pages. I also managed our version control using GitHub for the project.

This was my first time doing any kind of app development, as well as my first time coding in Java. Needless to say, I had a lot of fun and learned a lot from the experience.

Linus Lam
Worked on information and data gathering, and contributed in the learning process of how to use Android Studio. Created another separate working version of the app. Also created the App Icon.

GreyValor
I worked on question design and formatting as well as linking between questions and buttons.

I've never worked with Android Studio before, and although it was difficult to pick up at first, I learned a lot and became inspired to work on more apps in the future.

Jennifer Bui

Updates

Denil Poudel started this project — Apr 01, 2018 12:50 PM EDT

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