Picto

Picto is a system developed for Galantucci-style language workshops aimed at school children. The study aimed to measure the children's ability to create and learn an abstract language.

📜 Rules

Participants are divided into ordered pairs consisting of a Speaker and a Listener. The Speaker must communicate the selected image to the Listener using symbols provided. The Listener must then choose the image being communicated based on the symbols chosen by the Speaker.

🎯 Aim of the game

The aim of the game is to have as many correct answers as possible.

📑 Objectives

The experiment aimed to measure cognitive capacity for creating and learning an abstract new language during the period of most rapid brain development. An article detailing the system's workings and study results is forthcoming.

Suggested interface

📢 Speaker

👂 Listener

⏳ Waiting screen

Features

• Customizable image and symbol selection
• Parametrized topology generation
• Admin panel with complete control over each game
• Multiple independent games can be played simultaneously

API Reference

API reference is available at /swagger-ui.html

Deployment

To deploy this project run

  docker compose up

Environment Variables

To run this project, you will need to add the following environment variables to your .env file

PICTO_DB_HOST

PICTO_DB_PORT

PICTO_DB_NAME

PICTO_DB_USER

PICTO_DB_PASSWORD

PICTO_JWT_SECRET

SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE

Running Tests

To run tests, run the following command

  mvn clean test

Known Issues

1. Server Sent Events

As of now, in certain cases, events sent by the SSE are blocked by adblockers (e.g. in Firefox), causing the entire application to stop working. To work around this, we recommend using Chromium-based web browsers when interacting with the application through its frontend. A complete rewrite of this application based solely on websockets is in the works to mitigate the problem.

2. Data validation

Since Picto started as an internal project for a specific frontend, there aren't as many data validation mechanisms as needed to make it work on its own. We are aware of this and are actively working on improving the project.

Related

Frontend: github.com/skni-umcs/picto-front

Roadmap

• Migration from Sever Sent Events to Websockets

• Implement Data Transfer Object design pattern

• Improve hardening, in particular add data validation for all imputs

• Improve summary generation (don't include generations, which are not full, etc.)