SATMakeYourPoint.com

It’s Armchair’s latest project for the College Board: SATMakeYourPoint.com.

It’s a lightweight interactive piece for the back-to-school season. Users plot their dot on the graph and see how they compare to other users who’ve answered the same graph. You can click a white dot to see what graphs a particular user has answered. If you’re revisiting a graph you have already answered (as remembered by Flash’s SharedObjects and cookies), the graph will auto-load everyone’s dots.

Of course it comes with the usual groovy bits: tags, browse, and search. You can also highlight a friend (assuming they have answered the same graph), or email it to a friend.

This was a serious collaborative effort involving ActionScript, PHP, JavaScript, and MySQL development. Stefán Kjartansson, Kevin Byrd, and one of our summer wonder interns Ted Ullrich did the design and visual effects. Nate Steiner created the HTML and CSS.

My role? Handle the back-end development and make it work with the Flash and ActionScript 2-driven front-end. I also did some additional ActionScript development to properly process and load the XML data.

I used CodeIgniter to power the back end, along with some custom PHP scripting to support URLs with query strings (for tracking purposes). In CodeIgniter, query strings are an all-or-nothing proposition. As a result, I wound up re-writing the home page code, but retaining most of the CodeIgniter views used throughout the site. This way the site is still easy to update and change.

We’re still tweaking and enhancing it, but we’re very happy with how it’s working so far and how many users are responding to it.