About the Project

ROQuiz is a GUI quiz application I developed to help me and my colleagues study the theory for the course Operational Research M.

Project History

In our students Telegram group, someone had previously shared an Android app with a few quiz examples: paolopiano1997/QuizRicercaOperativa. Although it was somewhat useful, since it featured a set of full examples with questions and answers, the application was quite buggy and limited. Before the exam, another student posted a more comprehensive set of questions in a Google Form. This set included almost 90 questions, but it wasn’t customizable, and there was no way to simulate a quiz without using additional tools. For these reasons, I decided to develop an initial JavaFX prototype of a “““better””” application, which my twin and I beta-tested before sharing it with the rest of the students.

After the exam, since I found the application extremely useful, I started upgrading it, adding more and more features, until I decided to create a mobile version.

Why?

The list of motivations is long: I love side projects and open-source development; I had almost no experience in mobile development, and as a computer engineering student, it seemed like a valuable skill to add to my toolkit; I love learning new shiny stuff; and, ultimately, I wanted to create something genuinely useful, and a mobile application seemed to me a great way to exercise, since you can bring your smartphone wherever you want.

With that in mind, I started exploring different technologies and frameworks until I came across Flutter — a relatively new framework (released in 2017; it was 2021 at the time) that caught my attention. Flutter stood out because it offered excellent support for cross-platform development. At the time, Kotlin Multiplatform wasn’t yet widely known, so Flutter felt incredibly revolutionary, especially since it was developed by Google and was open source.

After diving into the documentation (which, like most Google products, was really well-made), I managed to create a simple and functional prototype, which I released as ROQuiz v1.3-mobile_beta.