Story Squad: A better way for kids to spend their time?

For the last four weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of working on the single player portion of a unique little app called Story Squad as a part of Lambda Labs. Founded by Graig Peterson and Darwin Johnson; Story Squad’s mission is to get kids off the brain melty stuff that kids are doing nowadays like YouTube, Fortnite, mobile games, and social media, and get them into something that can help their brains develop instead.

How does it work?

Story Squad allows people to take on a mission that involves writing a story and drawing a picture. They can then upload these as image files and go head to head against others in a voting challenge. Each player gets to vote which story besides their own that they think is best, awarding points to the player that gets their vote.

The single player portion of the app that I worked on is a bit simpler. You still get to accept missions, but you upload your story and get back a rating from a data science API that scans the image. This rating is what we wanted to incorporate into the reward system for single player.

The Task At Hand

My team of 3’s biggest task when doing our portion of the project was figuring out the best way to implement the reward system in the single player mode known as the trophy room. Some of our biggest concerns going into this project were just learning how to develop things for children, as none of us had ever had to think building an app in that way. You want any feature involving children to be mostly positive, so the reward system has to feel earned without feeling punishing.

The Solution

We talked a lot about the layout, and how we wanted the trophy system to work when planning out our roadmap. We knew we wanted it to be a point based system, and the ability for the user to check their progress through those points. So we decided to add points to the user based on how many times they read, submitted a writing, and submitted a drawing, then awarded them the trophies based on those points. We knew this wouldn’t be the way the final product would do it, but it would work for our purposes of getting something up and running. The biggest hurdles before we even got to this were just bugs that needed to be fixed in the front and backend code.

Concerns

When we first got ahold of this project, it was so broken it took us a week to get it running, and another to get it running correctly. So a big portion of our first couple of weeks on this project was just bug fixes to get the code to a workable state. I still took a lot of positive from this portion though, as it taught me how to get around an unfamiliar codebase.

Finishing Up

In the end due to the amount of time spent fixing bugs, we got a rudimentary model of the trophy room working that we were okay with. We only got a month with the product so that time we lost mattered a lot. You can see a demo of what we accomplished below.

I’m hoping the team that works with the product in the future can take the basic structure we created and get a good system setup for awarding points based on writing and drawing scores. There’s also quite a bit of functionality that can be added into the parent dashboard that was a can of worms we didn’t want to open yet.

I learned quite a lot working on this product that wasn’t just about code, but working together with a real team. Learning how to problem solve as a group I feel is an invaluable skill that I’ll take with me for the foreseeable future. I feel like I’ve gained a leg up in terms of experience on a real project now.