I am really proud to show you R750Exporer: https://r750explorer.me (German)
About the App
The App is a combination of treasure hunt (German: Schnitzeljagd) and geocaching for the city Radolfzell near Lake Constance. Radolfzell celebrates currently to be 750 years old.
Some locations will be shown in a Google Map with additional historic information from city archive. If you reached the location, you could unlock questions by code. These codes are located on stickers at the locations. Giving correct answers, you could then reach the high score and win some cool items from our sponsors.
How is it done
During one week, we have developed with 10 youngsters (no IT skills, 14 - 18 years) supported by our IT apprentices this Java based app.
We have done it in “an agile way” creating userstories, paper mockups and some (flexible) sprints. from Zero to 100% in five days! Starting on Monday we managed relaxed go-Live on Friday.
Technology
We decided to prefer Java to be more typesafe. It was easier to finde errors for our apprentices than creating a JavaScript app.
The Java Webapp is based on Spring-Boot and uses our Airtable.java API to manage all data. Airtable is used as database.
The webpage is based on a responsive layout using Bootstrap.
Our apprentices had created a rough frame of the app including some logic and JUnit test bevor we started to implement the details of the app.
Using GIT and continuous delivery we deploy automatically the app.
You can find the sources on public Github: https://github.com/Sybit-Education/Coding-Camp-2017
The official game is published on https://r750explorer.me
Conclusion
Airtable supported us to focus more on app logic than on complex SQL queries. It was really easy to define some more columns, adding images to rows, viewing the data etc.
The learning curve was very low for the youngsters.
