Animal Hybrids Explorer
Overview
I designed and built a digital companion to the Animal Hybrids programme. During the programme, children imagined an animal hybrid, sharing their genetic compositions and survival skills and these were made into published trading cards. I designed the digital platform to give children the ability to playfully interact and discover animal relationships based on genetics, and view their cards.
Context
Once children receive their printed trading card, the interaction with the programme often ends there. The goal of this tool was to provide a platform to keep engaging with the publications they created by letting children see all the cards, find their own, and explore how the animals share genetic traits. Alongside this, as the programme grows, it was important to build a backend that internal team members could use to edit and update the database easily.
Solution
I built a browser-based explorer with a web connecting different animals based on their listed genetic composition. Children can see the closest relatives of their chosen animal hybrid, play around, find their friends' cards and so on. On the backend, adding to the database only requires a simple spreadsheet with AWS links copied into it to hold the images and other card data.
Reflection
I primarily used Replit to build this interface. It was interesting to see how AI-based development could work, but the more useful part was developing a structure I could go into and modify myself, rather than relying on AI prompts for every edit. This helped me prevent the app breaking or hallucinating while still engaging with the platform efficiently, and put me in a useful place between design and development.