Turing Students Make App for Young Readers
BookWorm combines gamification and playfulness with the common task of a reading log.
App: BookWorm
Project type: Mod 4 Capstone
3 Front End engineers: Kelly, Thao Ma, Connie Hong
2 Back End engineers: Joe Jiang, Catherine Dean
As a former teacher, Turing student Catherine Dean knows firsthand how challenging it can be to encourage, incentivize, and track a student’s reading progress in a fun and meaningful way. So when she pitched the idea of a reading app for kids, fellow former teacher and Turing teammate Connie Hong was immediately onboard, admitting, “I was the kid who constantly checked out multiple books at a time from the library.”
The app is designed for young readers to track their reading progress and can be used inside and outside of a classroom. Stretch technologies include web push notifications, D3, GSAP, and JavaScript.
“It was really rewarding to be able to build an app from the ground up.”
This was a fun one to work on, Connie says, especially in terms of UI/UX aesthetics and features the team could implement. “Kelly helped us a lot with introducing us to D3 for the progress bars and was instrumental in helping us with debugging. Thao did a ton of component building with JavaScript and piecing together a lot of our functionality. I had fun figuring out D3 functionality and rendering our GSAP animations. We also paired quite a bit along the way.”
Create. Collaborate. Repeat.
Creating and maintaining a useful and informative API contract was challenging, but this team had great dynamics and managed to meet every day to discuss changes and ensure that everyone was on the same page. Managing many moving pieces among a larger number of teammates—especially while job hunting—also meant careful coordination between Front and Back End. They nailed it.