- To learn about and apply good architecture, patterns and best practices while working on the front-end part of a project for the first time using React.
- To help students deepen GCSE History course topic timeline comprehension as well as dates and key facts memorization.
- To incentivize individuals to improve their history knowledge by making use of gamification, high scores and if the time constraints allow it, by challenges, competitions between players.
The choice to use an at least slightly familiar framework for the back end was made to catalyze the learning process of the front-end development. I did not set out to implement the user interface with React, I set out to learn about and to apply the best practices while doing so. When creating levels for well-known historic time periods as well as the GCSE History course dates I also created a couple a test levels for themes that were not planned e.g., planets of our solar system, months of the year. These levels seemed to work surprisingly well with application’s gameplay. The question whether it is better for history or other memorization tasks, could not be answered at this point, which leads to very important future work.
- The API used to run the game is written in C# and can be found here.
- React-Bootstrap for cards and other premade components.
- react-beautiful-dnd for drag-and-drop functionality.