Does someone need to bump the Thunkable Server now and again? Live Preview seems a bit funky

Hi ThunkableX team!

I’m running a Girl Scout badge earning event (Coding for Good - App Development) using Thunkable. We’re in our final week (week 4) and I noted this afternoon that our example app no longer “previews” as it had in the prior 3 weeks. Specifically, only the first few labels on the home screen containing additional images and buttons appears. We haven’t added any new code items since it last previewed without issue (Monday afternoon).

Here’s a link to the project: https://x.thunkable.com/copy/d7789025ca07aac808af3c58a9d0885b

Thanks for any assistance you may be able to provide! We have our closing Zoom meeting Saturday afternoon (Pacific) and it would be great if I didn’t have to hold my phone up to the screen :wink:

BradH
Volunteer
Girl Scouts of Orange County

Hey @gsoc.codingforgood.a :wave: Hope the event went well for you!

Were you using the project preview page for this? Was your app published as a web app?

Thanks.

Hi there and thank you for your reply! We had 40 girls attending a Girl Scout “coding for good” app development badge; a four part series where girls followed along with a YouTube video and met at the end of the week via Zoom to discuss any challenges they’d faced. By and large girls were syncing down to their phones or tablets, but we had incorporated a bar graph (Google Charts) which I knew wouldn’t work on iOS devices – so we had been using preview heavily at that point.

While preview had been working fine during the event, at the point I’d added this thread we were only able to make out a few of our labels, but none of the buttons, on our home screens. I tried preview just before sending this reply (which is now two weeks after our event) and preview seems to be working fine again. Really not a big deal in the bigger picture, and we truly appreciate the Thunkable platform as an ideal tool for introducing app dev concepts to 4th - 6th graders. We hope to run a very similar event again in the fall.

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When you say you had difficulty making out the components, does this mean they didn’t display at all, or that they were displaying but difficult to see (maybe incorrectly sized?)


Glad to hear that. In 10 years teaching online and offline classes I don’t think we ever managed to have a “Hello World” class where everyone got everything working the first time. Eventually we developed our own troubleshooting checklists and by doing some really clear expectation management at the beginning of the session we were able to get things running as smoothly as possible.

Will the participants get a badge now for their work?

All 40 girls received their “Coding for Good - App Development” badge! We provided a “follow along” example app but encouraged the girls to use their creativity as long as it fit within our identified app design objectives. Here’s a video overview of a subset of the girl’s accomplishments:
https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21ABSNZVtbH2JQzMQ&cid=475BB050CAC7E954&id=475BB050CAC7E954%2128550&parId=475BB050CAC7E954%2122876&o=OneUp

Sorry, forgot to provide the case level details. The home screens contained (from top down) a column layout and two horizontal layouts. The column layout contained two labels. The first horizontal layout contained anywhere from 3 to 5 buttons (these were the troop numbers). The second horizontal layout contained two buttons. When I mentioned that the preview wasn’t working, the symptom was that only the two labels in the top most column layout were displaying, and nothing else.