ActiviGO!

Inspiration

Anytime a family moves, a large measure of stress can come from figuring out what schools will have the extracurricular activities they desire for their children. Searching through school websites for information is a tedious, meticulous, and frustrating process if the information you are looking for is even readily available or complete. This is further compounded when a family has children in more than one school. We wanted to solve this problem by creating a simple, clean, easy-to-use application that is intuitive and readily updated. Our focus is initially for Montgomery and its surrounding areas due to the high number of families coming into our city.

What it does

ActiviGO! is a mobile application with the following features:

Intuitive user interactions and visuals to quickly allow a parent or student to find activities of interest
Allows saving any and all "favorite" activities
Provides additional prompts for other activities that may interest the user
Extreme filterability, to include keywords, standard data points, and even a visual category representation
Push notifications for "favorite" activities when updated
Push notifications for new or updated activities at schools being "watched"
User provided ratings and comments for specific activities
Push notification to activity managers for periodic updates and "suggest an edit" updates
Secure verification of new activity managers
And more!

Our technical challenges and how we addressed them

Our team encompassed four people. Our composition included a parent, a high school student, 38 years of combined IT military experience, and 4 very active mobile app users. Despite having quite a bit of IT experience, none of our team had experience in direct mobile application development nor much with the tools provided for this hackathon. We jumped in anyway, determine to apply the knowledge and skills we did have to our challenge. This allowed us to focus much more on the user experience and wireframing with Mockflow to fully explore our concept.

What we accomplished

We designed an application our entire team is excited about, one the parent and the student on our team would download and use today if it was available. The application feels familiar and instinctive, yet our research could not turn up any other application with the flexibility and ease of quickly finding information as relevant to the user. Our application enables a parent to readily determine what schools will offer the most applicable activities for his/her children whether they have one, two, or eight kids. We offer an application built upon user inputs and gentle nudges to keep the information both current and more complete than what is usually offered on a school website. Finally, we have created a fresh, on-trend method of finding and consuming the resources offered by our schools all in the palm of your hand.

What's next for ActiviGO!

Next for ActiviGO! is getting a sponsor to take on the project and rollout the application nationwide for parents, school administration and students alike to utilize.