MultiCulti

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  Pop-up box for intersection

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  After clicking start

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  Countries change color

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  Front Page

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  Iceland exchange

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  Mexico landscape

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  India dialouge

Inspiration

Our goal was to teach children about international dress. The inspiration for the design came from the game Poptropica where avatars exchange clothing to customize the user. We wanted to put a twist on the game where it educates kids about different cultures around the world, the different traditional clothing, and increase social awareness of beauty of all different kinds.

What it does

Our app allows the user to control an airplane around the world map until they find a country that they want to visit. Once they choose a destination, a chat opens up with a local from the country wearing and describing the clothing. Then, they can take the outfit from that person and wear it themselves!

How we built it

We used JavaScript and Photoshop to edit images for the icons and characters in the app, but the base is built in LiveCode. The different screens have individual card scripts that run the program and each of us worked on the different cards until merging them together at the end.

Challenges we ran into

After the first four hours of the Hackathon our group hadn't landed a plan, although we had bounced around from idea to idea; all either too ambitious or not passion-driven enough. So after talking it out we decided that we wanted to build an app that encouraged kids to learn to code and simultaneously promoted social awareness. However, the algorithm that would make the users think about the path of the airplane and write it out before execution would be too time-consuming to write in the code that we were all comfortable with. Given the limitations of LiveCode, it seemed more sensible to address this aspect of our idea in the future and have something tangible to present.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

In the process of combining the different chunks of code our commands didn't match up and despite painstaking debugging and hours of perseverance on everyone's behalf, we could not figure out what the problem was. Instead of getting frustrated and giving up, we took a bathroom break, cleared our heads, ate some chocolate and reapproached the program and found a solution. This was the biggest moment in the night for us because it meant that our program only needed minor finishing touches for aesthetic purposes.

What we learned

We went to the workshops on Web Design and the JP Morgan Challenge. The advice we got from these mentors allowed us to come up with our idea and make goal in a team. They showed us that we needed a concrete plan and to assign specific roles to each member of the group. While this may seem intuitive, it is easy to get angry when things don't work out, especially when those problems are due to a lack of communication. We learned to prevent such problems from occurring in the first place by checking in on each other and truly making a group effort that combines our individual artistic and computing knowledge.

What's next for MultiCulti

Despite the time restraint, we still want to have a page for each country and to have the user write commands out to move the airplane, like executing code, instead of using arrow keys. This addition would be geared toward older users who would want logins to save their progress as well.

Built With

• javascript
• livecode
• photoshop