Story Squad: Creative Writing
Covid-19 has had and will continue to affect mental health in a negative way for everyone, especially children. This is one of the many problems children have to deal with every day. Story Squad is a creative writing and picture drawing app that allows children to compete with their peers allowing a healthy outlet to compete with others safely. Creative writing has many benefits: creative writing can help develop creative problem-solving skills, gives the writer opportunities to give and receive criticism for what they wrote, and helps build vocabulary and communication skills (McDaniel College Writing Center). There are many features to this web app to engage and excite the user; one of the main features I worked on was the win streak system for the global leaderboard. Children love streaks and competing with others and a way they can compete with others is trying to get the highest-scoring streak as they can before it gets reset. Story Squad has an extensive code base and has a lot of features to look through. I was concerned about how big the code base is and if I could get anything done with the limited time I have with the project.
Technical Hiccups
After downloading Story Squad onto my local machine I had immediate problems trying to boot it up. First, there were environment variables that needed to be set for the API, AWS, and ElephantSQL. Once they were set, I tried running the server and…. crash… There are several errors regarding the extensive database. After a couple of days of getting to know the application and code-base, we figured out the migrations on rollback were wrong. Subsequently fixing the database, the API now works! somewhat… Though not all the features were working, as we thought they would have, we were able to start working on the front end with the limited functionality of the API.
Now that we have the API working we started to work on the front end and see how it interacts with the backend. Almost immediately we see some UI mistakes like colliding text, hard-to-read text, and overall lack of intractability. We immediately start writing down all the UI fixes we would like to implement in a Trello board and get to work.
A Reflection on Story Squad
With some help, we were able to make a good-looking responsive home and leaderboard page; Implemented a streak system that resets if the user loses a game, and fixed a whole lot of bugs. With the bug fixes and notes, I believe the next team that will take over the project will have an easier time getting started and implementing more features. One of the features I would like to see is the user being highlighted and placed at the top of the leaderboard.
This project has been the best learning experience I could've asked for. Though there were issues getting started, it was nice working on an extensive codebase because I get to review and learn other people's code. I learned about Node Cron, AWS S3 buckets, and ElephantSQL because of this project. I am excited to use these technologies in my own projects.
