Arcade Academy | Devpost

Epic fishing, one of the three current games on the site.
A typical class view for a teacher. You can add students and assign quizzes here.
A typical dashboard view for a student. After selecting an assignment, youu may choose between three games to start playing and learning.
An example of a teacher creating a multiple choice question for a quiz.

Inspiration

Our inspiration for Arcade Academy came from live classroom engagement tools like Kahoot - we wanted to make a platform which makes learning both fun and easily accessible for children of all ages.

What it does

Arcade Academy lets teachers create online multiple-choice quizzes for their students. However, these are not just mere quizzes! Once the teacher assigns a created quiz to a class, students in that class will be able to take that quiz in the form of a game: for example, rather than selecting the correct answer for a question, students may try to "fish" the correct answer out of a lake with many rapidly swimming fishes.

How we built it

The games were created and drawn on an HTML canvas, with rendering logic being done in JavaScript. Our website was built with React, and we used Firebase as our authentication and database solution.

Challenges we ran into

As we were working on separate components of the website for the most part, it was difficult to integrate all the moving parts into one cohesive website. We had trouble displaying our games as our main application was built with Typescript in React, while the games were written with Html5 canvas.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One of the best accomplishments that we made is how nice the website looked. Before working on website design, it had always felt awkward, not visually appealing in the slightest. This hackathon we took time to design the looks of our website to make it look more natural. Linking Firebase to each of our individual mini games was one part where we struggled with and after bug fixing for such a long time, fixing was a great relief. We felt so proud when we finally were able to solve a problem that took is forever to solve.

What we learned

This project was a challenge as where none of us in the group ever used Canvas HTML. We were all extremely confused on how to start our assignment spending a lot of time watching YouTube and reading documentation to get ourselves familiar. We really learned a lot because of how knew this was to us. Most importantly, teamwork is the greatest skill we all obtained and learned from. A team is needed to complete something great, and it is important to learn to help each other out because you never know when you need help.

What's next for Arcade Academy

We want to look at creating additional games in order for students to have a more fun experience. We will also be looking at ways to promote friendly competition between peers, such as designing a points system and leaderboard for each class assignment.