Coding newbie here- app for a school project!!

[yoyoyipp]

hello!! i am an absolute beginner at coding, literally do not know a thing. but I'm trying to code an app for my school fundraiser- a 'read-a-thon' and I was wondering how you would make a counter app for students to add how many pages they've read and also the amount of money their sponsors have pledged per page. then there will also ideally be a leaderboard to see how many pages students have read (but not how much money they have collected- only they should be able to see this!!!).

I'm trying to make it so this works on both android and ios to make it all-inclusive. please help!!! thank you so much!!
- also I currently have vscode and I'm on a mac!
i am also a big figma person- so usually I only do frontend design but yeah.. any advice or youtube or resources would be helpful!!

 

[CodeMonkeyJ]

Ambitious project! This will involve two main parts: a mobile/web app and a server backend.

You've got a lot of options for cross platform, mobile app development. Too many options, really, that ends up making it difficult to choose. Some popular ones are Ionic, React Native, and Flutter. Just Google "cross platform mobile app framework" if you want more options and to compare them. For an absolute beginner with not a whole lot of time, I'd recommend Ionic. It can build for phones and the web with one codebase and it just uses JavaScript, CSS, and HTML/XML.

For the server backend, you've got even more options. Most mobile app frameworks use JavaScript, so I'd recommend using JavaScript for the backend, as well, so you don't have to learn even more languages. I don't have any hands-on experience with them, but they're easy to learn and pick up (I'd be happy to tinker, as well). Based on a cursory search ("node.js web framework"), Express and Koa seem to be a couple of the most popular. Express looks like it'd be the easiest to get up and running in, so I'd recommend that. Koa looks good, but it seems to require a lot of third-party libraries which tends to create a dependency and research hell.

It's a lot to learn all at once but that's just the way it is. If you're still interested, keep us posted on your progress and feel free to ask any and all questions and we'll try to help out.