It was Cohort 22’s turn to go to CIC, a great co-working space in Wynwood, to pitch our final project to friends, family and hiring partners. My groups project is Memori, a spaced repetition digital flashcard app for language to learn new vocabulary. My daughter Ayanna pitched the idea to me, which I then pitched to my class. Out of about 15 pitches, her idea became one of the final 5 and I got to work on it, which was awesome.
Since Ayanna came up with the idea, she was our user story. Ayanna has been learning a language on her own and would like to work on building her vocabulary. There are other flashcard apps out there, but with them, you have to tell it whether or not you got the answer right… She wanted the app to decide whether you got the answer right by having to type your answer in, and not only get it right like being able to guess from multiple choice (aka multiple guess), but would have to type in your term and spell it right for it to count as correct.
Johanna worked on the front end of Memori, and for her first time ever doing anything with design and layout, she did an amazing job. Will handled the login, and set up the Facebook and Google login integration. I did the rest of the back end in Rails, plus wrote the algorithm that decides how often and when a term appears for study. Will filmed my daughter to be a part of our final project presentation, and she did an awesome job too.
I was so nervous about Pitch Day right up until the very moment…and then I just felt really excited to get up there with my team and present what we came up with. It could not have gone better, and afterwards judges asked us some questions about our app. I was so nervous about the type of questions we would get, and ended up being kind of disappointed they weren’t more probing and technical. I think I was just super eager and would have enjoyed any opportunity to talk about Memori. Another team who developed a real estate social sharing app won. It was bittersweet…it would have been great to win, but they worked incredibly hard too and absolutely deserved it. I was so impressed with everyones final project, I would not want the judges job to decide which one was best.
Myself and Matt, another guy in my cohort (who was part of the winning team) won the Spirit of Wyncode award for embodying the values of Wyncode. That was pretty exciting and I was super honored to have been chosen for it. Most of my class went out to celebrate afterwards, but I was just way too exhausted, plus I wanted to spend some time with my daughter for a change! My friends took us all out for dinner, and then I went home and slept the deepest and most peaceful sleep I’d had in 10 weeks.