Computer Science is an extremely important field in this day and age with more complex and interesting devices developed every month. One problem with this, there is a lack of skilled programmers filling positions to program these new devices. What better way to introduce computer science/any related field to children, than with cute animals!
The concept behind the project is to be able to expand the journeys that the dog can follow, CS does not have to be the only one. In essence, each "story," has multiple different stages consisting of fun, and interactive games relating to the subject, rewarding users for completing the tasks in each stage.
Rufftastic is built upon HTML5 & PHP. The PHP handles storing of user information (through the use of browser cookies), and HTML5 for the visuals (dogs!).
The main difficulty we faced was time, we loved all of our challenges for our Python "story," and would have loved to incorporate new stories based on elements of music theory, mathematics, and more!
Visuals! Our design style is what really makes this game unique, which was not possible without our amazing graphic artist, Alexa! On the technical side, we were very excited to be able to execute Python in the browser, as our initial concept relied on multiple-choice questions and answers.
So much! PHP was a relatively new language to most of us, so we really were able to grasp the concepts by the end of the weekend. Animation-- starting out, we had only known little about how two-dimensional/traditional animation was done, but by the end, we were nearly experts!
We intend to add as many stories as we see a need for! We really wish we could have developed more of them to show, but will definitely continue to pursue more of them outside of the hackathon!