Divergent 101 for CSA

[jm1021]

🚀 Open Coding Society

Mission Briefing: NG-OG, Next Generation Onboarding Game
Stardate: Sept 12, 2025 → Demo Day: Sept 18, 2025

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🎯 Mission Objective

Your crew of 6 will invent and prototype a next-gen onboarding game (NG-OG) that helps future rookies engage through data-driven interaction.

Your tool will:

• Run on GitHub Pages (a simple, shareable site).
• Feature frontend learnings gathered during peer reviews.
• Begin enabling backend data stores to track user progress.
• Show progress & progression that motivates rookies to keep playing and learning.

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🧑‍🚀 Phase 1: Brainstorming (Sept 12)

• Review frontend ideas and peer comments from your last live review.
• Consider: students often lose track of where they are. Tools like progress trackers or milestones could solve this.
• Brainstorm:
  • What futuristic features would make onboarding fun and sticky?
  • How could the game guide new rookies task by task?
  • What data would keep them returning (XP, streaks, level-ups, grade-style predictors)?
• Think about Grade Predictor mechanics (70% → 80% → 90% → 93%).
• Sketch out data attributes and relationships:
  • Entities (User, GameSession, Achievement, Tool).
  • Relationships (1:1, 1:many, many:many).
• Stay on task: weird, wacky, visual, and fun. No criticism.

⏱ Timebox: 20 minutes

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🧑‍🚀 Phase 2: Convergent Design (Sept 15)

• Vote on top game/task concepts from brainstorming.
• Define the core loop:
  • What players do → what feedback they get → how they progress.
• Draft a data model sketch:
  • Entities, attributes, relationships.
• Refine UI mockups to match data needs.

10 to 20-minute lecture on API, JPA, and POJOs

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🧑‍🚀 Phase 3: Data + UI Prototyping (Sept 16–17)

• Implement first data store prototypes (JSON files or mock APIs).
• Connect frontend UI to these mock data stores.
• Showcase how progression data is visualized (bars, meters, badges).
• Prepare for demo readiness.

10 to 20-minute more on API, JPA, and POJOs specifically related to College Board

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🧑‍🚀 Phase 4: Demo Day (Sept 18)

• Present your NG-OG prototype.
• Show:
  • Core idea + game loop.
  • How data tracking works.
  • UI refinements based on peer feedback.
• Collect feedback to fuel the next week of Sprint 2, starting Sept 19.