Posts

Blog Post written by our clients Jo Van Herwegen and Laura Outhwaite

  IOE Researchers and Computer Science students join forces to bring the Maths@Home app to more families.  Maths@Home is a free app targeted at parents and professionals who wish to help children to develop their maths skills through fun learning activities.  The Maths@Home app gives adults a bank of ideas for various games and interactions, which can be played during their daily family routines using resources easily available in and around the home.  The app has been co-created with parents by Prof. Jo Van Herwegen and Dr. Laura Outhwaite from IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society.  The latest version of the app has been made possible through collaboration with the Computer Science student team. Maths@Home app design The Maths@Home app includes 25 maths games with four levels, based on mathematical development research and are aligned with the Early Years Foundation Stage Framework from the Department for Education.  The games are designed to support a broad range of mathematic
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Final Stages of Development and Play Store Preparation

As we approach the finish line of our app development project, we've encountered and overcome numerous challenges, learning valuable lessons along the way. A pivotal decision in our journey has been the separation of our codebase into two distinct repositories, one for Android and one for iOS. This strategic move, prompted by compatibility issues with iOS, marks a significant milestone in our development process. In this blog post, we will explore the reasons behind this decision, the steps we took to develop the Android app, and how we are gearing up for the app's launch on the Google Play Store. Our initial vision was to manage a unified codebase that would seamlessly cater to both Android and iOS platforms. However, as development progressed, we encountered features that worked flawlessly on Android but faltered on iOS. These compatibility issues forced us to rethink our strategy. Splitting the code into two separate repositories emerged as the most effective solution to tai
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Launching Maths@Home on iOS: A Journey of Discovery and Solution

Our adventure with the Maths@Home app took a surprising turn when we shifted our focus to launching it on iOS. After successfully deploying the app on Android, we were confident that the transition to iOS would be smooth sailing. However, reality had a different plan in store for us. What we thought would be a straightforward process turned into a deep dive into the intricacies of iOS development. When we inherited the template code from the previous team, it wasn't immediately apparent that there were issues with the iOS configuration. Our assumption was that after polishing the app for Android, getting it up and running on iOS would require minimal adjustments. This assumption, however, was far from accurate. We quickly discovered that the iOS setup was, to put it mildly, quite problematic. Our journey to resolve these iOS challenges was both enlightening and demanding. Here are the steps we took to bring the Maths@Home app to life on iOS: Initiating Code Configuration by Pod Ins
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Hosting Our Server API on Azure WebApp

As we progressed through the development of our app, the front end began to take shape, marking a significant milestone in our project. However, a crucial component needed to ensure our app could operate effectively in a real-world environment—the server API. Initially hosted locally, this setup was sufficient for development and testing but would not suffice for a production environment. Our solution? Hosting the server API on Azure WebApp. In this blog post, we’ll dive into our decision-making process, the steps we took to host our API, and the impact it had on our app's usability outside of a developer environment. As our front-end development neared completion, the need to host our server API in a stable, scalable, and accessible environment became increasingly apparent. After researching various hosting platforms, we chose Azure WebApp for its reliability, scalability, and integration capabilities with other Azure services. Azure WebApp's ability to handle the deployment a
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Integrating Google Analytics: A Big Step Forward

We've made an exciting update to our Maths@Home App by adding Google Analytics. This new feature lets our clients see lots of important information like how users interact with the app, how long they use it, and what they like about it. It's all about giving our clients a better picture of how the app is used. Getting Google Analytics to work with our app was tough at first. We ran into a few problems trying to get all the pieces to fit together just right. But we didn't give up. Our team worked really hard, using Google's guides and doing a lot of tests to make sure everything worked as it should. Thanks to our team's effort, the app now sends updates to our clients in real time through Google Analytics. This means our clients can now see how the app is being used as it happens. This is a big deal because it helps our clients make better decisions on how to improve the app and make it even more enjoyable and useful for users. By adding Google Analytics, we're m
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Challenges, Levels, Likes and Dislikes

After implementing the game pages, we sought to incorporate more features requested by the clients. Specifically, a levels system as well as a challenge page. In this blog post, we’ll delve into how we implemented these features and the impact they’ve had on the app's overall experience. The concept of a levels system was introduced to provide users with a sense of progression and accomplishment. To implement this, we leveraged the existing 'levels' column in the players' database. This database column became the backbone of our new system, allowing us to dynamically adjust the game's difficulty based on the player's progress. We introduced a picker on the game selection page, enabling players to easily change levels without needing to navigate away to the edit players page. This intuitive feature meant that with just a few taps, the app could fetch the current level from the database and update it as soon as the player opted for a new challenge. This seamless i
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Adding Games

We were tasked with integrating 25 non-interactive games into our client's app, a challenge we accepted with enthusiasm. This blog post aims to share our experience, the hurdles we encountered, and the innovative solutions we deployed to make this integration a success. Our initial strategy for incorporating these games into the app was straightforward. We decided to create a separate .tsx file for each game. This approach seemed logical at the beginning, as it allowed us to structure each game independently. We proceeded to create skeleton files for each game, laying the groundwork for what we thought would be a smooth development process. As we delved deeper into the development phase, we began to encounter several challenges. The primary issue was the realization that managing separate .tsx files for each game would not only be cumbersome but also contrary to good coding practices. The games, despite their variety, shared a common format, including elements such as images, audio
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