💡 Inspiration
Due to COVID-19, many of us have experienced a lack of community and a feeling of disconnect from social engagements. Finding ways to engage with friends while minimizing one’s interactions in large public spaces is more of a struggle now than ever.
Because of this, millions of people have experienced feelings of isolation and diminished mental health. According to one medical journal The Lancet, an estimated 53 million people developed a major depressive disorder in just the first year of the pandemic, in large part due to lost opportunities to socialize.
A prominent way for people to stay connected socially has been easily accessible online multiplayer games. Games like Among Us and Jackbox Games can be easily picked up for a few rounds to play with friends.
We wanted to combine a party game with accessibility, so we integrated free language learning as the main focus. Alternative technologies for learning a new language are pricey (such as Rosetta Stone or Babbel), which creates a barrier for people who can’t afford to invest in their skill-building and makes multilingualism a privilege. Meanwhile, free-to-use apps like Duolingo can be unmotivating for individuals to practice a new language when it doesn’t offer the integral social aspect of language learning.
To address the need for ways to safely engage with friends during the pandemic and bridge the language gap between socioeconomic classes, we’ve created the game Potato Translato.
🥔 What is Potato Translato?
Potato Translato is an app that allows friends to learn a new language together in a mini game format.
Friends join a lobby together and choose the language they want to practice. Gameplay involves passing around a “hot potato” on a time limit. The player who holds the potato has a few seconds (randomized between 3-8 seconds) to translate the word on the screen. If they get it wrong, they can guess again within the time limit, but if time runs out, they lose a life. If they get the word right, they pass the potato to the next player. Each player has a total of 3 lives per game and the last person standing wins!
🛠️ How we built it
Potato Translato was built using:
- Figma
- HTML/CSS
- React
- Typescript
- Less
- yarn and npm
- craco
- express
- socket.io
- Google Translate API
🔍 Research
We started out by doing some initial research online. Because of the time constraints, we didn’t have time to extensively interview or survey people, so we looked online and asked a few friends about some of the challenges they experienced.
👤 User Flow
We created this flow based off of hot potato and bomb party game.
✏️ User Sketches
🌱 Low Fidelity Prototyping
🎨 Visual Design
We chose bright, energetic colors. For text and buttons, we selected high contrasting colors to increase accessibility and readability. We checked that the colors were accessible using WebAIM’s contrast checker.
Since the game is based on hot potato, we wanted to base the theme around a potato. We also added cats because cats make everything better!
🌲 High Fidelity
📰 Research
“The games that got us through the pandemic”. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/06/02/video-games-covid-19-pandemic/
Santomauro, Damian F et al. “Global prevalence and burden of depressive and anxiety disorders in 204 countries and territories in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic” https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02143-7/fulltext
🏃♀️ Challenges we ran into
One challenge we ran into was setting up socket.io in order to allow multiple users to join & create lobbies across multiple computers. We were able to connect our client and server using socket.io, but were unable to add the room functionality successfully, and we hope to address this challenge in the future.
Another challenge we ran into was that, due to the time constraints, we were unable to conduct thorough user testing on our prototypes. We were able to show the prototype to a few friends, and the final design was tested by everyone in our team, but in the future, we would like to get feedback from a wider set of users and at different stages of the design process.
🏆 Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of everything! We’re really happy with the idea and think this project is something we would definitely continue using after the hackathon. Our project’s success was in large part due to our streamlined development process – we spent time going through the steps of the UX design process, planning out code structure, and delegating to front-end and back-end developers.
📖 What we learned
We were previously familiar with only JavaScript with React for building web apps, so this was our first project using TypeScript for a React app. This was also our first project that was a game, so we found it fun to think about solutions in a different way (and it also made it fun to test along the way!).
🚀 What's next for Potato Translato
In the future, we want to transition Potato Translato from a pass & play game to a fully online game that includes functionality allowing players to create and join game lobbies. In addition, since our app is a language learning app, we want to integrate levels of languages that accommodate players of different skill levels in their language learning journey.
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