Within our peers and ourselves, we’ve come to the realization that covid had more effects than we once realized. Covid, a deadly virus not only made many ill but also ruined our generation's study habits. If one was to ask alumni about their study habits compared to someone currently in high school, it would likely be very different as our generation spent the years where many develop their vital study habits learning online. Amongst ourselves, we’ve decided that we would create a game that helps motivate students to study subjects that covid impacted the most, math.
From our struggles in gr 10 pre-AP math, we realized how difficult it is to motivate ourselves for an upcoming test, or a difficult quiz. Countless students find math a difficult subject to study, let alone grasp concepts. However, Bubble Cat solves these problems!
Math has always been one of the subjects that gets the most boring to study, whether it's from the redundancy to just not being as exciting as others, however, we believe that the key to enjoying studying is having fun.
With our unique game, the user is sure to have fun while studying, especially with the cute graphics and cats, inspired by our love for felines.
Bubble Cat is a fun cat-themed game with one main goal: motivating high school students to practice math. At the start, Bubble Cat will give two options, rules or start. After selecting play, you’ll be given 5 different subjects within math (ie. trig, quadratics, etc.), where you can choose which subject to practice. After clicking on a bubble, there will be a treasure chest presenting you with 3 math problems. If you get all three correct, a mystery cat will come and reward you. After, you can reselect to go to the selection screen with the 5 subjects again and try a new subject or continue practicing a previous one!
Together we created Bubble Cat on Replit using python Tkinter. Throughout the past day, we taught ourselves how to create a working game utilizing Tkinter which included learning how to get buttons to work, new screens to appear and more. To create Bubble Cat we had to create several components such as the buttons, the graphics on another website and the randomized questions.
Starting off, we created an outline for what our game would look like, with the graphics and mascot/logo. Afterwards, we started to create the first page which contained the controls for the game. We then started generating different problems for the user. After the users answered each question, the level will be complete and they could move on to the next topic/bubble. All our topics are related to high school math courses so it will be a successful way for students to prepare for their exams/tests and consolidate any in-class information they don’t understand.
With our final project being successful, there was no doubt that we also ran into many obstacles. Our initial project was a Discord Bot, however, we believed with the amount of time we had, we wouldn’t be able to create a meaningful and fun bot like we originally planned. Thus why halfway through the hackathon, we decided that we should change our idea to something that would be more unique and achievable, Bubble Cat. Another obstacle we came across was time. Within the first hour of Treasure Hacks 3.0, we realized that the hackathon was actually ending at 3 am EST Sunday as we are in a different timezone, significantly reducing the time we had to code. Furthermore, our group had a lot of school work as summative and exams are soon so we also had to balance our time wisely. The third major obstacle was the display/code as this was our first time coding a game with Tkinter. We spent a lot of time trying to get the buttons to work and appear in the correct spots along with disappearing when supposed to. Also, we struggled to get the input bars to work as it wouldn’t properly save the value the user imputed. However, our biggest struggle was our retry button, which allowed users to go back to the question type screen and choose a new type of question. To solve this issue, we had to revamp a lot of the code and research extensively.
Since we restarted our project and we were programming a game with Tkinter for the first time, we're extremely proud that we finished our project in time. Also, our team generally has relatively low coding experience using Tkinter - for example, most of us had no idea how to make buttons and get input boxes to work. We're proud that we were able to create successful buttons, different pages, present randomized math problems with Tkinter. Additionally, we were able to make our final product aesthetically pleasing!
In short, it was a great accomplishment for all of us as we were able to create a platform to help students, as we know as students ourselves, how difficult math is. We hope that Bubble Cat will grow in the future, and help students all around the world study a variety of subjects.
After two days of coding, everyone in our group learned something new. Since at the start, half of us were completely new to Tkinter and the other half only coded with basic knowledge, we learned a lot about how to create a game, which we didn’t know was possible, using Tkinter. We also expanded our skills in editing and creating visuals!
In the future, Bubble Cat will be more than just a math game. First of all, we want to change our platform from replit to an app. This will make Bubble Cat more accessible for many, allowing Bubble Cat to assist more people. Also, a big addition we want to add is different subjects. We were thinking about science, such as biology, chemistry and physics. We’re also planning on adding more questions and maybe even images with the questions for topics like trigonometry. Lastly, we hope to make a page where you can select your grade, so younger children could as well use our game!