Project 5: Trivia App

Project Summary

Our class got assigned into various groups, with each group tasked to create an application that achieves a certain goal. For my group, we had to develop a quiz app, and we decided that we would test users on general trivia. We used Thunkable to create the app, which used block-based programming.

Approach

I am particularly proud of this project because of the way I approached it. Rather than creating many screens and manually writing a question in each screen, I created a spreadsheet (Google Sheets) in which all members of my group collaborated on, in which we each contributed a few questions, creating a question bank consisting of ~30 questions.

From this question bank, I used the "data" feature of Thunkable to import all questions into a list of question objects which were able to be dynamically loaded to the screen using code. This way, the user would get a new set of questions every time they played the quiz.

Reflection

• I was challenged by the unfamiliar user interface of Thunkable. I had to learn how to create and program certain elements of the app in the limited space I was given. Since this was a group project, and Thunkable did not have a collaborating feature, our group also had to find workarounds in order to finish this project outside of class. We decided that was not plausible for everyone to be working on a divergent branch of the same project, so we decided to join a call and have one person physically update the project while others in the group monitored.

• I created a spreadsheet with other group members that contained all questions that the app could quiz the user on. Then, I created a screen that dynamically renders questions. When the screen receives a "rendering" message, it will fetch a random row from the table of questions and update all labels to the answer choices. Finally, I presented and shared the project to the class.

• I understood how it was possible to make certain tasks easier by using spreadsheets. They are a very common way to import data (they are stored very similarly to CSVs), and can help you avoid having to repeat the same tasks when creating applications over and over again.

• If I could revisit this assignment, I would definitely consider using something other than Thunkable. Although it was acceptable, Thunkable's user interface just doesn't seem appealing enough for me, as I feel like it takes a lot of "mouse actions" (e.g. mouse clicks) to do simple tasks. Additionally, it's collaboration feature seemed to be locked under a paid plan, which made it extremely difficult to work on—especially as a group project.