Term 4 Challenge
A sunny window-TV scoreboard for Milawa Primary. Three units chase 60 tidy squares each. Four prizes stay secret on the path until each reveal date. Strikes sit on their own grid and take one tidy square off.
The board polls /api/score every 3 seconds, so a TV in the window and a phone on yard duty stay in step without WebSockets. Scores live in Vercel Blob (or Upstash Redis) when those environment variables are present. With no durable store, the dev server writes data/yard.json on this machine instead.
Run it locally
npm install
npm run dev
Open http://127.0.0.1:47221.
While STAFF_PIN is unset, the desk accepts 737373. A custom pin must be six digits. Yard duty starts by tapping a name — Jess, Craig, Ash, Ricky, Tiff, Doug, Hunter, Jenny, Richard, or Maria — then the code. That device stays signed in as that person until someone taps Lock desk. Every tick is stored with their name. The window shows the latest name, and the desk keeps a short list of who gave points.
On the TV
- Leaderboard shows a Today sidebar of the eight latest ticks, strikes, and prize unlocks (with kid-facing teacher names like Miss B and Mr Kerlin), the school tidy total out of 150 squares, and three grade cards stretched across the TV. On the TV each card has the grade, a circled tally, a 60-square tidy track with a coloured tick in each earned square and a trophy on each prize square, and a separate 30-square strikes grid. A strike takes one tidy square off and fills one strike space. Trophies stay on their prize squares. On a phone the grids stay off so all three classes fit, with large +1, +2, and −1 buttons. The school button is +3 all.
- Prizes puts the countdown clock to the right of the heading when a finish time is set, then each class path and the line “Unlock prizes as you get more ticks.” Every stop stays a lock until that prize’s reveal date. After that, the path shows the picture and the name.
- Yard & Rules puts the aerial on the left and the four scoring rules on the right.
- Start Kiosk sits next to the cog. Kiosk hides the header and the score buttons, and keeps a Today column on the right with the eight latest ticks, strikes, and prize unlocks. Daily News and Student Highlight stay off the kiosk until a teacher ticks them in Settings. Each screen picks two runners from the seven kids and staff. The lead can change up to three times, then one of them hits the finish. Move the mouse or touch the screen and tap the X, or press Esc, to leave.
- Settings (the cog) lets anyone choose the bottom timer — coloured rectangles or the running race — set how long the leaderboard, prizes, and yard pages stay on the TV, and paste a Jimmy’s cricket code or share link to add a Cricket page. The admin code unlocks page ticks, Daily News and Student Highlight, the finish clock, what each prize says, a picture upload with a thumbnail, and a reset for scores and reveals.
- Daily News is a kid-facing bulletin with a live clock, reminders, coming-up lines, and an optional photo. Admin edits it in Settings.
- Student Highlight comes from the yard desk. A teacher picks a class, one or more students, and a reason. That page stays on the TV for two days. Extra recognitions become extra pages in the kiosk loop. Drop named photos into
public/students/ when ready.
- Prize reveals are four extra pages, one for each prize. Before the date the countdown says Prize 1, Takedown 1, Prize 2, and Takedown 2. The two prizes show a yellow lock on a black square. The two teacher takedowns show the silhouette and the words Teacher takedown on the path. When the time arrives the card flips, the real name appears, and the cartoon shows.
Yard duty desk
The padlock in the header opens the name list, then a 6-digit code pad. After that, the phone-sized desk can log:
| Action | Effect |
|---|
| +1 | Something great: a tidy patch, helping, leading, or a job done properly |
| +2 Epic Surge | Outstanding cleaning |
| −1 Stray Strike | Ball, jumper, or rubbish cluster |
| +3 Teamwork | Adds 3 to all three units |
Scores clamp between 0 and 60. A strike lowers the tally by one and marks the strikes grid, up to 30.
After a tick, Give reason appears for a few seconds. Skip it and the points stand. A saved reason joins today’s ticker and stays in the reason record on Craig’s desk.
Class prizes, per unit, every 15 ticks: 15 Game with Mr K, 30 Teacher Takedown #1, 45 laser tag for the class, and 60 Teacher Takedown #2. None of those names show on the prize path until the reveal date in Settings. Staff can open Mystery ideas on the desk for pie, ice bucket, and dress-up prompts. Those lines never appear on the TV.
Jimmy’s cricket can feed one TV page. In Settings, paste a short code such as BQWA8Z, or a share link. Short codes load from https://jimmyscricket.vercel.app/api/board/<code>. Type preview to see a sample ladder.
Deploy on Vercel
- Import this project.
- Required: add Upstash Redis from the Vercel dashboard (Storage → Create Database → Upstash Redis) and connect it to the project. Without Redis, ticks look like they save and then reset to zero on the next request — the serverless filesystem is not shared between instances.
- Confirm the project has
KV_REST_API_URL and KV_REST_API_TOKEN, or UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_URL and UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_TOKEN. Either pair is enough. @vercel/kv is the client this app uses.
- Set
STAFF_PIN to a private 6-digit code, or leave it unset to keep 737373.
- Deploy.
The score and PIN routes run on the Node.js runtime so local file fallback still works in npm run dev. On Vercel the board refuses to save until Redis is connected, and the homepage shows a clear warning if storage is still memory-only. The yard duty desk says which store it is using.
Five wrong codes rest the pad for 60 seconds. A successful sign-in is kept in this browser, under that teacher's name, until Lock desk.
