When we first created our team, we wanted to be team Monkey Business. With such a silly name, it was a given that we had to make a project equally as silly. What better audience would appreciate us if not K-5 students?

BANANZA is a website that offers 6 simple yet effective mini-games for young students to practice motor, memory, routine-building, and decision-making skills. Game description cards provide the name, description of the game, and a play button that leads the user to an embedded mini-game, which also has the option to go back to the website.

We used Figma to prototype the website design. Afterwards, we split up into 2 teams, one on front-end development using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript while the rest worked on creating the six mini-games used with Scratch and Unity. The Scratch mini-games were embedded into the website.

Translating the Figma design, especially horizontal scrolling and trying to fit images into the container template was difficult for our beginner front-end developers. One of our mini-games ended up being very time consuming and required a lot more work than we expected (scoping issue). The biggest struggle was managing project sharing through GitHub and understanding how branches and commands worked.

Our front-end developers are very proud of the UI Design and being able to code a majority of their idea despite not having much experience. Being able to spit out 6 games in a weekend is also an amazing feat from our freshmen game-devs.

For our 2 front end developers, we learned how to properly utilize GitHub so that we could work side by side and collaborate. We learned a lot more about the relationship between the markup/scripting languages too. On the game development end, one of our developers learned a lot about the immune system to accurately represent the information and built his knowledge on Unity game development.

With more time to work on development, we hope to enhance the game experience and UX experience for users. Accessibility is also a goal for us and we hope to also make BANANZA IOS compatible for schools that may provide iPads for young students.