Bit Wizards

Learn the magic of CS!

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https://github.com/neeleshroy06/BitWizards

Inspiration

Scratch is an awesome platform for young aspiring engineers to learn the fundamentals of programming! As good as it is, it can sometimes fall short of optimizing young CS education. For instance, Scratch does not have any integrated learning tutorial environments. This is where BitWizards comes in!

What it does

BitWizards takes the fun and creativity of Scratch and combines it with an integrated tutorial and fun adventure style game! Users can drag and drop blocks to move the wizard sprite.

How we built it

We built it using Next.js, TypeScript, TailwindCSS, and Clerk Authentication using Google OAuth. But the real magic is in the Scratch like block engine! Scratch is a fork of Google's Blockly library. We utilized the power of Google's Blockly library and adapted it into our application. We added our own blocks, functions, and logic! We also drew our own pixel art using pixilart.com!

Challenges we ran into

The Blockly library is a tough library to decode. The documentation on Google is dense and not updated to modern TypeScript. We read the documentation as close as we can and carefully integrated it into our code! We also ran into how we can render a sprite. For example, we initially used Pixi.js, but it seemed overkill. Instead, we extracted the Wizard sprite by itself and uploaded it as a single sprite and utilized the Next.js image component to display onto the grid.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud to create a socially impactful, educational, UI/UX excellence, and on theme project. We created this project with good heart and persisted no matter the obstacle. We are proud to create a working prototype that has potential to rival Scratch. All in the name of sparking interests in the next generation of engineers! At the center of our passion, struggles, and celebrations in making this project, we had the users in mind.

What we learned

We learned that communication is vital in a team setting. Each team member must all be on the same page, caught up with one another, and know what to do next. We must assign each other specific and different tasks to avoid conflicts, especially merge conflicts. Overall, our awareness of the importance of communication is what allowed us to create this project in 9 hours, which is a feat we are very proud of!

What's next for BitWizards

BitWizards has potential. We will keep on adding new features like new programming concepts, sorting algorithms (bubble sort), and especially fixing bug issues.

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