Bet On It
Description:
A social platform where one can place bets against a friend or an anonymous user, easily allowing the phrase "Bet on it." that often is used jokingly to be turned into reality.
Inspiration:
The idea for a social betting website came from Nudge, a book written by nobel laureate Richard Thaler. He discovered that however marginal, the possibility of losing money motivates people to adhere to their promises. More specifically, we wanted to create a fun app to motivate Markus and Jian to go gym.
What it does:
Currently, we have only been able to implement a coin toss game and a monetary amount attached to each user profile that is logged in and authenticated through our backend. We are able to create game rooms which others can join, and play. We have created a platform such that we are easily able to create new games, and add them onto our site. In the future we hope to utilize the google cloud computing platform to ask about the weather, and the temperature.
How we built it:
We built it by simultaneously running two node.js servers. one for front-end utilizing the react framework, one for back-end. Communication between these two servers occur using the socket.io library. Our user-authentication utilizes the firebase database, and we use the firebase protocol to ensure the passwords of our users are protected.
Challenges we ran into:
Keeping track of everything that a user should have, designing the front-end and the back-end was a new experience for our entire team. We basically had to implement an entire system from scratch, and we also try to ensure that we run all of our games on the server-side since we are unable to do trust any computation done on the client side. As we divided up our work into discrete portions, we faced a major hurdle merging all of our work into a final working product.
Accomplishments that we're proud of:
Although we set out with more lofty goals of potentially even implementing weather betting, we stayed realistic throughout our project, and managed to assemble a demoable product. This was a first for our entire team to design some sort of website, so it was very exciting to see each component work.
What we learned:
We learned to utilize the react framework well beyond the tic-tac-toe tutorial. Tongyu and Jian learned new front-end practices and a significant amount about designing client-server interactions. Alex and Jian worked on utilizing a database in order to keep track of our users, and learned about how databases keep passwords private (if implemented correctly). Markus worked on developing the entire backend server to make our website run.
What's next:
Implementing a more flushed out user profile with a match history, and adding on different games onto our platform (guessing the closest number, guessing the temperature the next day)
Built with:
NodeJS, ReactJS, Firebase, socket.io.
Prizes we're going for:
HAVIT RGB Mechanical Keyboard
Call of Duty: Black OPS 4 (XBOX ONE)
$100 Amazon Gift Cards
LS20 Gaming Headset
Grand Prize
Jetbrains Pro Software
Blu R2 Plus Smartphones
Misfit Shine 2