Manoa Dojo

Manoa Dojo is a group project created in collaboration with Ryan Barsatan, Xen Huang, Stephen Mau, and myself. The purpose of Manoa Dojo is to allow ICS students to create study groups to cover material in a course. Students can identify themselves as either a Sensei, one who teaches class materials, or a Grasshopper, one who wishes to learn.

User Features

Manoa Dojo has the following features:

Create and join study sessions

• Displays all of the existing study sessions
• "Like" sessions to keep them marked on your calender
• "Unlike" sessions if you decide you don't want them marked on your calender
• Schedule your very own study sessions

User profile

• Display your contact information
• Edit your profile information to let others know more about you
• Link a picture for your profile pic
• Specify classes where you are either a Sensei or Grasshopper

Calendar

• Shows all of the sessions you have scheduled/liked
• Color coded to distinguish between sesions you created and sessions ones you liked

Leaderboard

• Attend or create sessions to earn points and make your way to the top of the rankings
• Two different categories: Sessions Created and Sessions Attended
• Partcipation rewards you with different belt colors to show off to other users

Chatroom

• Chat with other users in the same session as you
• IT AUTOSCROLLS!

My Contributions to Manoa Dojo

One of my earliest contributions to Manoa Dojo was logo for it. After our group came up with the name “Manoa Dojo”, I decided to make the logo look Eastern-styled, since a dojo is a place where martial arts are practiced. The green and white color of the logo was meant to make it resemble the University of Hawaii logo. Four versions of the logo were created before we voted on the one you can see on the webapp today.

My second major contribution was the Leaderboard. In order to keep the theme of dojo, I incorporated belts of different colors. Just like belts in Karate and martial arts, the belts in Manoa Dojo represented your progress and “rank” amongst the users. Originally, belts were supposed to be a counter for a user’s rank in the leaderboard (i.e black belt for the #1 ranked user, white for the lowest ranked user), however it wasn’t a very good comparison since you can’t drop down in belt ranks in real life martial arts, and there are only so many belts that some users may not even get a belt of their own. So in order to make things more fair and realistic, the belts now display for each user with their designated rank based on participation.

Other contributions included deployment and minor spell and grammar checks.

Reflections

If I learned one thing from this project, it would be the importance of teamwork when working in a group. I myself wasn’t feeling too confident in my javascript; I knew what I had to do but didn’t always know the proper way to implement it. Thankfully my group members were able to cover for me and clean up my code to get it to work properly. Likewise, I was the only member of my group to have experience with photoshop, which came in handy when making a logo and other pictures. Each of us brought a specific set of skills to the table when helping design Manoa Dojo. All of us applying these different skills eventually culminated in the completed version of Manoa Dojo.