Type: Solo Academic Project
Skills: Coding in Java
Tools: Android Studio
Time Frame: Three Weeks
Purpose: Create an android mobile app using SQL databases, queries, activities, Intents
Groove
Context
Who doesn’t love to dance? Whether it is by yourself in your room or with your friends, dancing is the happiest form of movement and a great way to turn exercise into an exciting activity, so why not transform it into game? Groove is an app that merges digital media with physical activity to encourage young children to move daily while still having fun. Groove turns fun dance moves from social media platforms, video games, movies, and TV shows, into steps that children can follow along with to learn the dance, as well as encourage them to be physically active while being online, because who doesn’t want to try that move!
This application promotes activity in young children through the use of media in the form of a game. The user must do as many dance moves as they can before the timer runs out. The more moves the user does, the more points they get. When the timer runs out, the user can see how many points they scored and take a selfie to celebrate how well they did. To play again, just shake the device.
Regular physical activity in young children can help to improve cardiorespiratory fitness, build strong bones and muscles, control weight, reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression, and reduce the risk of developing health conditions (CDC), and Groove can help with this. Today, many children spend a lot of their free time glued to any type of screen, without moving their bodies for extended periods of time. Groove’s main purpose is to use digital media to encourage children to be more active. Transforming playtime into a cardio workout creates an entirely new world of healthy entertainment.
A common use case of this app would be for children who want to learn some of the fun dances they see online.
The initial design of the app featured four activities with a menu that displayed the scores of all of the players names and an image thumbnail. I decided to change this by eliminating the menu with the scores and implemented it into a button that the user can navigate to instead.
Demonstration of the different portions of the game: The user launches the app through the home screen. When the user clicks to begin the game, they can either enter their name through the enter player name screen, or use the menu to navigate to different elements of the game.
When the user clicks on the start button, they are taken to the instructions page, where they can either play the game, or view their previous scores. The user then presses play on the dance tutorial video and watches a recording of the dance to learn it. Once they have learned the dance, they shake the phone, and a pop up appears asking the user to either record their dance, or go to the next dance.
The purpose is to get as many points by learning as many dances as they can before the timer runs out. Once they are done playing, or the timer runs out, the game over screen appears, displaying the players most recent dance. The user can then either choose to view their previous scores, play again, or save their latest video. In the view scores menu, the user can search for their score, scroll through other players scores, or delete all of the scores.
A difficulty I encountered when making this app was the struggle to create clear dance tutorial videos. The best solution I found was to use slowed-down tutorial videos from social media platforms such as TikTok and incorporate them into the app from real users who have shared their videos on the platform. In the future I would incorporate more detailed dance tutorials so that the user could follow along more efficiently to the dance moves
