Team Size: 18
Timeframe: 4 months
Sprint Timeframe: 4 weeks
Role: Interactive Editor
Key Contributions: Challenge 2
Learning Prompt: Sorts items & Understands Ideas of Classification
Date Sprint Completed: March 2022
In this Mission, a “Sneaky Sock Monster” has gotten into a slew of socks taken from our friends in Nogginville, and left them very stinky at that, so you need to help sort them into their respective groups so they can be washed accordingly and returned.
Working during a four-week timeframe in March 2022, I was assigned the role of constructing the logic for Challenge 2 (C2). While the classification logic needed for sorting the various objects appears straightforward, this process involves several complexities, especially when accounting for the Leveling system.
***As is the case with most Noggin missions, there are three separate “levels,” in which a player’s assigned “level” of difficulty is determined based on a player’s performance in experiences across the Noggin app.***
In Level 1 (L1), as seen in my playthroughs here, all of the positions of the objects needed to be randomized across all three interactions, and this became tricky in the later interactions. Because of the different sizes of the objects, depending on the position chosen from the eight possible “macro positions” (one through eight), the specific positions of these randomizations needed to be tweaked for each object.
Basically, in most cases of position randomization, the macro positions can be used interchangeably across each object and duplicated, but in this case, each object required some time under the hood to determine its specific position to be selected.
At the higher levels (see below), this randomization was removed in the interactions outside of i1, but the higher levels brought a new challenge. In both Level 2 and Level 3 (L2, L3), “distractor” objects were added to the potential set to choose from, which was mostly straightforward. They bounce back to their starting position regardless of where you try to put them.
However, as part of the wrong answer (WA) logic, repeated WAs result in a highlighted hint telling you where to place the object you just unsuccessfully dragged. Because the “distractor” objects have no correct position, an unsuccessful drag of these meant that a highlight hint would randomly appear on one of the remaining objects that hadn’t been sorted yet. This in turn required a series of different nested tracking logic to see which exact objects hadn’t been dragged, and then randomly selecting one of them, in order to highlight one of them.
Level 3 carried over this logic as well as added a third sorting position to balance out.
This mission was a fun challenge as it felt like it heavily utilized the leveling ability of Missions to change up the logic of challenge.
Your sorting skills were sensational. Mission accomplished!
Matthew Floyd 