Parched? New App Quizzes Your Water Wasting Ways

The challenge: let's make a game about the drought. After a two days in App Inventor, we had a functional prototype! Then we decided, let's flesh this out and get ready for the Play Store.  That meant adding graphics, sounds, and making the game a real challenge. You have 45 seconds to catch all the water you can, but wait every 10-15 seconds you get a Water Quiz! Just a true or false question: Growing almonds takes more water than keeping cows? Water World uses less water than your shower? Bottled water is better than tap water?   Get it right? Your hill becomes more green, and you get more time. Get it wrong? Less time, and your hill will dry out to yellow, or grey. And after each question, the rain speeds up! When you run out of time, try to beat your high score and share a water fact you learned! We are currently testing the app, and adding new water facts, but here are some screenshots.   BEHIND THE SCENES Our lead designer, Storm White's behind the scenes look:

Deciding the general idea and design for the app was the easy part. The toughest part of building the app became how we wanted it to work. There were so many different ways to incorporate our facts with the gameplay. Should the questions be relative to time or to points? Should the raindrops fall at different speeds? What in the game creates incentive to play again? These are a few of the important questions that we had to ask in order to create a fun, informative and functioning game. They ended up being pretty tough to answer. Each suggestion required coding and testing it out. Then as a group we eliminated what we found didn’t work and what was not fun. With every decision we make we tried balance between being fun, challenging, and informative.

  Keep your eye out for this app, coming soon to the Google Play Store! Hope you learn and enjoy!