Story Squad

You can find the deployed project at AWS Amplify.

Project Overview

Welcome to Story Squad! We are an interactive learning platform targeted at grade school children, and we help build reading comprehension as well as artistic, writing, and analytical/critical thinking skills through weekly competitions.

Each week features a new chapter in an exciting novel, written and serialized specifically for Story Squad by author and educator Graig Peterson. Children are provided with prompts based on the chapter they've just read, and participants are then divided into teams of two. Students create art and fanfiction to match the prompt, before going head to head in a bracket-style tournament.

In addition to growing their literary and artistic skills, students learn team building and critical thinking skills through a unique voting system, where each child must weight their own work against their teammate in order to increase their odds of winning. Badges and points incentivize winning and encourage participation.

Story Squad is a paid service; parents are required to create the account for their children and pay a monthly subscription fee in order for their children to compete. This brings the platform into compliance with COPPA and ensures a long future for the project.

Key Features

A Custom, Serialized Novel geared toward children in 3rd-6th grade
Parental Controls which allow parents to add and customize child accounts
Secure Payment Handling via Stripe

Tech Stack

Front end built using

React

First Class Performance with Virtual DOM
Lightweight Library resulting in low bundle size/improved load times
Easy cross-platform development via progressive web app
Simple routing

Typescript

VS Code Tooling (Autocomplete/Tooltips)
Excellent error catching

Material UI

Clean, modern components out of the box
Easy to fine-tune per UX designs

React Stripe Elements

Includes stripe input building blocks
Manages Stripe prop injection

React-PDF

Displays PDF pages as canvases with a text layer

Front end deployed to `Netlify`

Back end built using

Express

Built in routing and middleware
Useful add-ons such as helmet and CORS
Well documented

TypeORM

Simple database creation, connections, queries, etc
Plays well with Typescript
Libraries simplify seeding

APIs

JWT & BCrypt

JSON Web Tokens are an industry standard authentication solution. Paired with BCrypt for hashing passwords, this allows secure local password authentication without reliance on third party solutions.

Stripe

Stripe is a RESTful API which "has predictable resource-oriented URLs, accepts form-encoded request bodies, returns JSON-encoded responses, and uses standard HTTP response codes, authentication, and verbs." It was chosen for this project because of Stripe's reliability and trustworthiness in the world of online transactions, as well as the way in which the API allows us to bypass storing sensative information.

Environment Variables

In order for the app to function correctly, the user must set up their own environment variables. There should be a .env file containing the following:

*  BROWSER=none
*  REACT_APP_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:4000

Content Licenses

Image Filename	Source / Creator	License
Material Icon	Google	Apache License 2.0

Testing

Jest

Simple testing
Mocking of dependencies
Promotes consistent unit testing

React Testing Library

Rendering React Components
Fire Events like onClick for testing user interactions

Installation Instructions

Clone repo

git clone [email protected]:Lambda-School-Labs/story-squad-fe.git
cd story-squad-fe

Install dependencies

yarn install

Run test

yarn test

Clone and download the back end
Follow back end setup guide

Run the application locally

yarn dev

Other Scripts

* build - creates a build of the application
* dev - runs the development server
* test - runs tests as defined in *.spec.ts files
* lint - format and correct errors with prettier

Contributing

When contributing to this repository, please first discuss the change you wish to make via issue, email, or any other method with the owners of this repository before making a change.

Please note we have a code of conduct. Please follow it in all your interactions with the project.

Issue/Bug Request

If you are having an issue with the existing project code, please submit a bug report under the following guidelines:

Check first to see if your issue has already been reported.
Check to see if the issue has recently been fixed by attempting to reproduce the issue using the latest master branch in the repository.
Create a live example of the problem.
Submit a detailed bug report including your environment & browser, steps to reproduce the issue, actual and expected outcomes, where you believe the issue is originating from, and any potential solutions you have considered.

Feature Requests

We would love to hear from you about new features which would improve this app and further the aims of our project. Please provide as much detail and information as possible to show us why you think your new feature should be implemented.

Pull Requests

If you have developed a patch, bug fix, or new feature that would improve this app, please submit a pull request. It is best to communicate your ideas with the developers first before investing a great deal of time into a pull request to ensure that it will mesh smoothly with the project.

Remember that this project is licensed under the MIT license, and by submitting a pull request, you agree that your work will be, too.

Pull Request Guidelines

Ensure any install or build dependencies are removed before the end of the layer when doing a build.
Update the README.md with details of changes to the interface, including new plist variables, exposed ports, useful file locations and container parameters.
Ensure that your code conforms to our existing code conventions and test coverage.
Include the relevant issue number, if applicable.
You may merge the Pull Request in once you have the sign-off of two other developers, or if you do not have permission to do that, you may request the second reviewer to merge it for you.

Attribution

These contribution guidelines have been adapted from this good-Contributing.md-template.

Documentation

See Backend Documentation for details on the backend of our project.

Known issues at the end of Labs24 6/24/20

Vote Button on Frame 38 After the voting time is over, a button saying "vote" is still present at the last page. It should either be removed or replaced with a button that returns the player to the main menu
Duplicate points on voting frame When the point allocation time is over, kids will see two intances of the point value for each versus block. There should be only one. https://github.com/Lambda-School-Labs/story-squad-fe/blob/master/src/app/components/versus/versus.component.tsx
Incomplete features on the moderator page - The "Children" "Flagged" and "Status" columns in the moderator dashboard have no functionality. They should display the number of children, whether or not a cohort has flagged stories for the current week, and whether or not the stories/illustrations have been viewed, respectively.
Styling for moderator page - The moderator view for stories and illustrations could use some styling work, as stories with large amount of profanity will show an overlap between the possible words display and the transcribed text.
- a zoom feature could be implemented for the stories in the moderator page, to be able to more clearly see ant hand writing.
- Only page 1 of the stories will be visible in the stories moderator page. can be fixed here https://github.com/Lambda-School-Labs/story-squad-fe/blob/master/src/app/components/admin-dashboard/cohort/submission/story.submission.tsx#L60-L64