Return of Monthly Community App Challenges?

Hey CodeCrew!

We received some feedback about bringing back monthly app challenges for the community!

I’d love to do this but I’d like to hear some thoughts about what format you would like see.

Perhaps the way we did it last year wasn’t the best? Should it be a free for all (build anything)? Should there be a theme? Should it be a specific set of app requirements? Should the timeframe stay a month or longer/shorter?

Let me know your idea for how we should run these!

By the way, If you weren’t here last year around the summer time, then check out the challenges we ran last year below!

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I really enjoyed the app challenges! Hopefully, they will come back :slight_smile:

It was so good to stay motivated, building an app to use your current knowledge or face challenges at which you needed to gain new knowledge. In my opinion, it is easier to learn with a specific goal (i.e. how to display stock ticker stats) instead of just learning how to display random data but have no overall app, so maybe the part of retrieving the data is missing, or the part of really showing ups and down in the data (else you might just learn how to display positive data) etc.
I also liked the idea to show your own progress and other people could follow you/assist you/learn from you/get ideas from you. When they all work on one topic at the same time, there is continuous progress; if everyone could code on anything anytime, this interaction is limited.

My thoughts:

  • Keep the specific app topic, but have more clear steps from beginner to intermediate to pro. For example, the water consumption app: In my opinion, everyone should stay with the water consumption (not logging food/nutrition values or sport activities), but have different app requirements: Showing the water consumption per day / showing the water consumption and have a daily goal / showing the water consumption including history of last week/month/… / showing water consumption but also other drink consumptions (soft drinks, alcohol, …).Till now, there were more or less just two requirements: Basic requirements and pro requirements. Maybe make the requirements more like beginner/intermediate/intermediate to pro/ pro

  • Give some help throughout the challenge (personally, this would be most helpful to me). Instead of showing the general code requirements at the beginning of the challenge (here you can retrieve weather data, here is a course how to handle API data) and the solution at the end, what about some progress after one week, two weeks, three weeks? If anyone get stuck, they no longer have to wait for one month to see the solution, but could tackle one obstacle and continue to create the app by themselves. For example at the weather app: After one week, you could demonstrate how to retrieve the data, after two weeks, how to display the data, after three weeks, how to add the current user location (instead of typing the city name into a search window) and so on.

On a side note: It would be helpful if you could demonstrate how to showcase your app (I used the screen recording feature of my Mac and created some background in Keynote … which is OK but certainly not the best option). And you should check if your app topic makes sense :smiley: I remember, when the NBA challenge was live, the season was almost over (no data to show!), so I switched to present the stats of the MLB.

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