Hackathon Winner

Hackathon Winner

Capital Quest: The Great U.S. Adventure

Mission Statement

We embarked on an ambitious 4-Day Hackathon that was specifically aimed at creating a comprehensive and engaging learning experience for users, utilizing the powerful capabilities of AI. Our team decided to focus on the topic of geography, as we believe it is less well-known and often overlooked in the realm of education.

About

The Great U.S. Adventure is an immersive learning experience designed for middle school students (ages 11-14) with a focus on U.S. geography. Our team included gamification features such as: drag-and-drop mechanics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) - driven chat, and leaderboard rankings.

As the hackathon commenced, our diverse team—Sarah Nguyen, Kamal Ramesh, Cameron Morales, Sara Chong, and myself—gathered virtually, ready to tackle the challenge before us. We meticulously dissected the brief, aligning our understanding with the project's goals and objectives, which centered on creating an innovative solution that addresses real-world needs. With team members spread across three different time zones, we orchestrated our collaboration through a series of focused brainstorming sessions, leveraging digital tools to enhance our communication. Despite the geographical barriers, our commitment to synergy and creativity transformed ideas into actionable plans, setting the stage for a dynamic hackathon experience.

Meet the Team: Our Vision for Innovation

Design and Ideation

The design process began with understanding the Hackathon brief, and identifying our target audience and their needs. Following this, we brainstormed quickly to generate ideas, encouraging creativity and collaboration among team members. Initial concepts evolved into tangible drafts that were tested and refined. Finally, we selected the most promising ideas for further development, ensures that the solutions align with both innovative goals and practical feasibility. This then led to our winning, final product, which we presented to our panel of judges and other competitors.

This image is our key feature checklist, in which we prioritized things such as “must haves” and included “nice to haves” to make our product not only make sense but look and feel good while being used.

Here, we can see our dot-voting system we employed to choose the design we wanted to continue with for Hi-Fidelity wireframing. While we still implemented design features from the others, this was the design for our main components and overall game.

Final Wireframe

Preview

  • Home Page

    A landing page for users that offers a quick intro to the game. They can choose to start a 'New Game,' 'Continue,' or go directly to the 'Leaderboard.'

  • Find the State!

    Once a new game starts, their goal is to find the state given by the AI bot, which is California.

  • State Found

    Users can move the pins to any state. Once they select the right state, their first mission is finished. The AI will share interesting facts about that state, and then users will be quizzed on them.

  • State Completion

    After finishing all items, the user reaches this page. Here, they earn a badge for the state they completed and receive a summary of their activities.

  • Recap

    Users can view their stats and ranking compared to classmates and other students, just like in a game.

Try it Out

Key Takeaways & Future Implications

This hackathon showcased the immense potential of collaborative innovation, resulting in our project’s triumph that emphasized features like gamification, an AI-driven tutor, and personalized, immersive, experience for our users. Key takeaways include the power of interdisciplinary teamwork, rapid prototyping, and the necessity of adaptability in addressing real-world challenges. Our achievement, which integrates cutting-edge technology with education, not only embodies our forward-thinking vision but also lays the foundation for future progress at the crossroads of AI and education. This experience allowed me to work closely with others and sparked my desire to improve my skills in areas I hadn’t previously pursued or valued. From learning how to properly incorporate AI into our design and be adaptive to users progress, to capturing and providing a realistic game experience, this project allowed me to grow in more ways than one.

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