5 Great Examples of App Academy Student Programming Projects

Checking out final student projects at App Academy is exciting. Throughout their bootcamp course, students work through examples of what web apps do, what they look like, and most importantly, how they work. By the time they arrive at the end of the course, students learn enough to create a functioning piece of tech they can show to prospective employers. While students push to build something special, teachers are sometimes surprised at how innovative builds get.

Over the past calendar year, we’ve seen students come up with different types of games, web applications, and mobile apps. Some use cool graphic libraries and fun design choices while others take established products and remake them with their own twist. In all, students express their burgeoning skills in awesome ways.

App Academy teaching staff talked to us about the following projects but they’re just a sample of the great variety and quality of apps produced by students. We analyzed them with the help of one of the bootcamp’s top instructors.

Check them out!

3D Pong and JS Hero

Created by Taylor Wong (3D Pong) and Jay Schwartz (JS Hero), these are JavaScript projects that use the three.js library to render 3D graphics. Three.js is a cross-browser library and Application Programming Interface (API) usually used to “create and display animated 3D computer graphics in a web browser,” according to Wikipedia. The instructor says both of the apps are visually interesting and “not at all” within the scope of what we teach in the curriculum. This means they’re a “testament to how quickly our students can pick up new technologies and run with them that they can get results like this in a one-week period.”

Looking at 3D Pong, notice that highlights around the arena move according to where the ball is to help depth perception. “I thought that was a very clever trick that showcased some design chops as well,” the App Academy instructor tells us.

Code Dash

This was a “Flex Project” completed by just two students on deadline, Ameet Vadhia and Vickie Chen, an unusually small group for this type of project. The course instructor tells us the students impressed technically with their original idea and because it did not sacrifice aesthetics.

The game itself is a two-player online code-typing contest that, the instructor says, uses “a combination of Websockets and logic to simulate a real-time typing experience for players.” We tried playing it several times against the computer and other players. We won a couple of times!

Code Ninja

This project was made by a single student, Julian Compagni Portis, who overcame early technical problems to come up with something quite interesting. According to our instructor, the build “involves a lot of complex and dangerous features” including a user “repl”, which allows users to type code directly into the website to be executed. REPLs are Read–Eval–Print Loops, known as “shells” in computer programming environments that take single user inputs.

“[The student] had to do a lot of legwork to keep his website secure in spite of this, and also just included TONS of features that we didn’t think he’d have time for. [Including] bots and testing for each task. It truly is an above-and-beyond project and something we only allowed the student to do because he showed so much passion for it,” our instructor said.

Stocks Overflow

Created by Angelica Velasco, this stock application has a strong design background based off a then-unreleased version of the Robin Hood stock-and-finance app.

The developer took cues from Robin Hood’s screenshots of a pre-release version of the technology and decided to create her own. Almost as if she had come up with the idea.

“In spite of not even having a complete website to work from, she did an amazing job. Turning out a project that was amazingly polished and just beautiful to look at. She also integrated multiple Finance APIs to generate the market data,” the instructor told us.

App Academy students take their curriculum learnings and turn them into useable, viable portfolio pieces they can showcase in any interview. Want to join the ranks of App Academy students and kickstart a new career in tech? Learn more about what we offer and how you can get started.