FRC Trading App
A fantasy-style fake stock market where Georgia FRC teams are the tradable "stocks". Users buy, sell, and track teams as if they were companies.
// Challenges
Designing a pricing model that's responsive to real FRC events without being so volatile that the market feels random. Also need a clean ingest pipeline for live competition data.
// Skills Used
// Current Status
Early development. Defining the price model, how team performance translates to stock movement, and the basic web app structure.
Brief
A fantasy trading app for Georgia FRC. Every team in the Peachtree District is a tradable “stock.” Users start with a fixed budget of fake money. They buy and sell teams. Prices move based on real competition results pulled from The Blue Alliance. Win an event, your stock goes up. Get eliminated early at districts, your stock takes a hit.
The point is to build something that combines two things I care about (FRC robotics and software engineering), to give the local FRC community something fun to play with, and to teach myself how to build a real web app end to end.
Where I am
Early development. Working through the design decisions before writing a lot of code.
Design questions I’m working through
The price model. This is the hard problem. A team’s stock price has to be responsive to real events so the game feels alive, but not so volatile that prices feel random. The model probably weights recent results more heavily than older ones, accounts for opponent strength (beating a top team should move your stock more than beating a rookie team), and dampens noise from a single match. Probably some variation of an Elo-style rating mapped onto a price scale.
Data ingestion. The Blue Alliance publishes an open API with team records, match results, and event data. I need a small backend job that polls the API on a schedule, normalizes the data, recalculates prices, and writes them to the database. The job has to be cheap to run and robust to API outages.
User experience. Fantasy trading apps have a known UX pattern. Portfolio view, individual stock pages with charts, a buy/sell interface, a leaderboard. The portfolio and leaderboard are the social hooks. The stock pages are where I can show real FRC stats alongside the price.
Data modeling. Users, portfolios, transactions, teams, price history, match results. Each table has to be thought through so the queries the app needs are fast.
Skills being built
- Web app development, full stack. Frontend, backend, database, API. This is the most ambitious app I’ve built.
- Data modeling. A clean schema is the difference between an app that scales and one that turns into spaghetti by week four.
- Working with a real external API. The Blue Alliance API has rate limits, response formats, and quirks. Building around an external system you do not control is its own skill.
- Pricing model design. This is half math, half product design. Get the model right and the game is fun. Get it wrong and prices feel random and players quit.
- FRC ecosystem familiarity. Knowing how the Peachtree District works, what events teams attend, how district points feed into the championship. Domain knowledge that makes the app feel right to FRC people.
Future updates
This page updates as the app develops. When the price model is locked, the formula goes here. When the app is in a usable state, a screenshot and a link go here too.