Background

Grandy was conceived as a fun and easy way for kids and grandparents to connect through video chat, messaging, and games. They would promote healthy communication habits between kids and older adults - spreading joy and wisdom across generations.

Project Overview

I was brought onto the Grandy project to help launch their first mvp. When I was brought on to the project the team had already built out much of the backend and app design.

I was tasked with integrating websockets and the Twilio meeting api so that users could interact with each other. Additionally, I implemented a connect four game, and an interactive survey that kids could fill out with their grandparents. I had no control over the design on this one.

Connect Four

Connect Four was intended to be the first of many games that would be added to the Grandy app. The reason for starting with Connect Four was that it is a simple game that is fun to play for everyone regardless of age.

You can also see an example of the Twilio api working here, although I am by myself on the "call" so you can only see 2019 me here.

Responsive

Of course the project also had to look good and work well when deployed to mobile devices via Apache Cordova. So I implemented best practice responsive design to ensure that the connect four game, interview section, and Twilio calls worked across all devices.

A Look into the past

As you can see below the app creators wanted a way for kids to connect with their older relatives and learn about their grandparents past.

Although there is none in the Twilio call here, you can see where a kid would be able to see their grandparents while filling out asking them questions in order to fill out the "Your Life Story" survey.

Once completed the app would generate a pdf which turned out to be much trickier to code than originally expected as the pdf templating engine available at the time treated the entire pdf as one giant canvas across pages which required some clever math to get the formatting to look good and accommodate for different answer lengths.