Virtual Pets

Inspiration

As college students, we all commonly experience when in-class discussion sessions are dead quiet. Broadening our perspective to all students including elementary grades, we can imagine how hard it must be for them. The fondest memory we have of elementary schools involve the rewards (such as candy) and the games. However, with schools having to transition online, those teachers are greatly limited to how they can reward students virtually and make games. Thereby, our theoretical app would come into play. We drew a lot of inspiration from other existing games for kids such as Club Penguin, Webkinz, and Tamagotchi. Specifically, we looked at how they customized their pets and the environments they were in. Based on these games, we noticed how kids seemed to invest more of their time and interest into programs where they could customize and own a type of virtual pet. Our app incorporates this concept into academia.

What it does

A fully developed version of our concept/application would allow for the teacher to be able to easily implement their educational material (questions) into a game, whether that be in a test (where answers are not revealed), homework or study set format (where answers are revealed). The game incentivizes students to actively learn by allowing students to earn points by answering questions correctly, which can then be used to customize their very own virtual pet and its environment. Rather than students handling educational topics, the app allows the students to play and work toward a goal of customizing and treating their pet while completing educational material.

How we built it

With the simple java program we created, we implemented a demo that displays the actions that the teacher and students can do. Specifically for our demo, we showed how teachers can input their questions to ask and access a student's points for their own sake of determining the students involvement. For the students side of the app, we showed how simply some components of the conceptual app would work. When the student answers correctly, they are rewarded points with which they can spend to customize their pet.

Challenges we ran into

The very first and one of the most challenging parts was coming up with what problem we wanted to solve. By bouncing ideas and thoughts of our experiences with educational systems off each other, we thought of many problems we could address although many were unrealistic with our limited programming knowledge. Once we finally had an idea we could potentially program to demo, it came down to writing the code. Initially, without having ever done an application without step-by-step instructions from an assignment, we all began to code whatever we thought would be necessary. The division of the code amongst us was very chaotic. We decided to reconvene to figure out the structure of the program and what we had already written to implement them in an organized and final program.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As the very first hackathon all of us have attended, we are all glad to be able to gain this experience to see what really goes into a hackathon. We believe we worked well as a team and communicated things smoothly and timely. We’re especially proud of coming up with this concept and creating a small demo thing to showcase a small portion of what it is capable of.

What we learned

We learned that the process of finding a realistic solution to a problem is much more complex than we had initially anticipated. We discovered that the process essentially involves determining an existing problem, creating a solution with it’s code, and then how and what to include in our presentation.

What's next for Virtual Pets

Moving forward, the visual pets concept should be created as an app as an easy interface for the students and teachers to use rather than interacting through a terminal. Additionally, we would want to be able to store all the data from each student into the cloud so that the teacher can access the information of any student whenever wanted for grading them. Additionally, with the cloud storage of the students data, the students would be able to cumulatively rack up their points, making this game able to last over the school year rather than only lasting for each session. Eventually, the student can look back on what they’ve done with their pet as a token of all their studying. A possible future implementation would be to have an option where the teacher can create a single class pet that could have other features that would track achievements of the entire class rather than a single student.