Hello again, blog. This week was a nice, chill week without any major hiccups or errors. I am extremely grateful for this because, so far, it seems like every week there is a something new that shuts down any progress. While there were not huge leaps in progress, I made some changes that improve the program. Also, this week we were told to prepare for a workshop where we will talk to clients about potential game ideas to help aid 5th grade science education. I will talk about that more later.

Okay so first thing I changed on the website was the nav bar. All duplicate nav links have been removed, leaving only the necessities. Since the beginning of the project, the ‘Hello {user_email}’ part of the _LoginPartial has not been centered vertically in the nav bar. This was a really weird issue because everything else looked fine. It turns out that this part was the only part of the nav bar that did not have a ‘nav-link’ tag, so it was not being styled like the rest of the elements. This problem is now fixed, and our nav bar looks a lot cleaner.

The next addition was the logic for decreasing the resource count when a request is approved for that resource. This was not all too difficult. I made it to where when the approve button is clicked, we get the resource from the resource table that corresponds to the resource ID in the request. We just decrease the quantity of the resource by one and save the changes back into the db. This change was needed to show more interaction between the objects, and it provided easy logic to decrease the resource count automatically.

Those were the main changes to the website. To prepare for the workshop, we were instructed to play a few games to familiarize ourselves with what kind of games could be made to help teach science. The games we played were Wake, Bloom, and Lakeland.

Wake was very interesting to play. I liked the discovery aspect of swimming around and scanning new wildlife. The other thing I thought was really cool about this game was the observation tank. With the wildlife you scanned, you can see how they interact with other wildlife by putting them both into the tank. This was great and I found myself learning about interactions between otters, urchins, and kelp.

The other two games were interesting as well. Bloom was more economically based where you are trying to get different farms to work together and build a strong economy. Lakeland was about building a town and making sure you have enough food from the farms to sustain it. It taught about nutrient levels in soil and what happens with certain natural phenomena.

Overall, this was a solid week for Disco Tray. I am waiting to hear back from IT regarding the emails for the site, and I am waiting to hear back from Christy Coker so we can meet up and present what we have so far.