The Color Rap Book

A charity project during high school

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Overview

Throughout high school, I have been exploring programming on my own, especially in C basic, C++ and iOS Swift. Since I have made a small management-related application for my school, in April 2020, I was approached by my high school principal about an opportunity to build an iOS application from the ground up. It was the digital version of The Color Rap Book, a children's cartoon book suited for readers between the age of 4 and 8. The publisher, Ann Harris Smith Foundation, is a charity group dedicated to ovarian cancer awareness. I loved the book and the charity cause, so I decided to take on this project. After spending about 700 hours, I was able to digitalize the book fully, with interactive games and animations implemented.

The Apple App Store's listing:

The Color Rap Book App - App StoreApp Store

Design Process

Pushing through the steep learning curve

When I first got started, I realized that my experience with programming was far from sufficient to complete the project. I have neither the coding knowledge required to interpret libraries and example code online, or any idea to manage the complexity of the app development. However, Swift is written in C++, and somewhat similar to Java, so I drew from my other programming experiences. Still, for the first three months (April to July 2020), I spent most of my time working through the most basic animations, such as the word display and simple linear and rotational movements. Reading through hundreds of posts on StackOverflow was hard initially, but I was accustomed to it as the project continued.

This simple text animation on Page 2 took me 23 hours to design and debug.

Trying different programming techniques and getting out of my comfort zone