Almanac

Inspiration

What it does

Almanac does not just store tasks, it schedules your every day life.

While our team was discussing problems that we face as students, one common aspect came to mind: organisation. We all have very chaotic calendars; if we do not complete a task, we have to reschedule it, and it piles up alongside new assignments. We also have to manually plan, rearrange and categorise tasks via colour codes, which can be very overwhelming.

Our solution is Almanac: a resource where you can connect your Google calendar and a to-do list (Task Manager) to the website. For the latter, users submit their personal preferences: a name for a task, a time-frame and options to reschedule it. When a task is completed, Almanac schedules the next priority. If a task is not completed, it is automatically rescheduled.

We built our software by having the front-end using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which provided the presentation for our user interface. At the back-end, we have the Python Flask framework.

Initial Ideation

As a group, we brainstormed ideas based on issues many university students like us face on a regular basis. We considered the possible problems a student may face due to the difficulty of factors such as planning their assignments, mealtimes, and meeting friends with similar interests. Eventually, we decided to create a calendar that connects to a student’s Google Calendar, permits a student to add their own tasks to it, and orders said tasks based on priority, length, and time frame. We chose this idea as it reduces the time, stress, and effort required by students to schedule their time efficiently. We also believed it was the solution that appeared most simple and relatable to the greatest number of students: this makes it easy to use, giving students an air of familiarity despite using a new app altogether.

Challenges we ran into

Over the course of the IKU Women in Stem hackathon, we faced numerous challenges that took hours for us to solve. A few examples of these included setting up the server, configuring the Google API to work correctly, and dealing with numerous domain crashes.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

Building a working web application Creating a registration system that stores all key inputs and outputs Creating a working demo ready prototype

Skills we learnt

We learnt as a team *3 key skills: * Time management, Patience and Resilience. To structure our time we spent our first hour planning an hour by hour itinerary. This ensured that we all stuck to our goals but stayed on time. As well as that we added buffers. We included clear checkpoints with measurable goals to get a sense of achievement and decomposed our problem into manageable chunks.

We learnt patience when we were all getting tired and slow from staying up for the whole hackathon and to discuss with each other our ideas best.

We learnt resilience when we made mistakes to bounce back from them and also to ask our team mates.

Wise track

Almanac removes the stress out of planning by navigating our busy everyday lives. Our solution purposefully looks as similar as possible to everyday calendars and todo lists to ensure that it is fully able to meet the requirements. In later developments we want to make our software even more accessible by having an inbuilt read out loud button instead of if the user wishes to use on they have to download one externally.

Hackiest Hack

we were coding till last minute walking out during the alarm, including carrying the server laptop out down 7 flights of stairs -the server does not like people, we had to keep on restarting it (╬▔皿▔)╯
all 3 of our team mates stayed up all night
we sadly lost one team mate in the first few hours due to illness ~~>_<~~
at 9 am we did not know if we would have a full program to submit, thankfully we did!
we had a file called backend.py since the first hour and it is still empty - nobody touched it.... we kind of let it down but we will never give it up.
we consumed as a team 1350mg of caffeine in 24 hours, that's over 1 shot of espresso every single hour! (⊙_⊙)？ -Mahi fell asleep on the floor in the last hour (she was awake too long!- she also had no pillow nor blanket)
Disclaimer Vee approved of our YouTube video.
our music of choice was 'The Git Playlist' on Spotify with songs called 'Push', 'Pull', 'Merge', 'Commit' etc...
we had a great time lots of fun because we did not give up! (yay!!!!) ヾ(≧▽≦*)o

Tiger Data track

When a user registers on our web page, their information is saved in Tiger Data. We created a hashing algorithm for user ID: when they log in, we can easily query the database for their information. We decided to use Tiger Data because it can store our data without deletion if we were to store it locally, for example on a local JSON file.

Beginner hackers track

This hackathon project enhanced our critical thinking skills, as we had to consider our target audience (university students), put ourselves in their shoes and analyse which one of our ideas would benefit university students the most: an easily understandable solution to a common issue. We also improved our knowledge of programming by learning how to utilise GitHub to collaborate with others, as well as programming a website targeted towards the rest of the student body. This also improved our debugging and problem-solving skills, as we ran into many obstacles along the way, such as figuring out how to get the Google API to work properly, as well as domain crashes occurring at the last minute. While designing the website, we considered easily memorisable features and aesthetics, in order to make the experience of documenting tasks and going through a calendar as quick and stress-free as possible.

Best domain name track

We researched words with correlations to terms such as “schedule” and “calendar”, considering the importance of etymology and significant meaning behind the domain name, as well as ensuring it is easy to memorise and pronounce by as many students as possible. We eventually decided on “Almanac”, a term derived from Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic, and defined in the Cambridge Dictionary as “a book published every year that includes information for that year such as important days, times of the sun rising and going down, or changes in the moon”. With the decline of physical documentation of events, school notes and other important information, we wanted our domain name to pay homage to a type of book used since archaic eras, and preserve this. Our website is called “www.almanac.luxe” as the art of scheduling one’s time efficiently is elegant and classy, and in a way luxurious.

What's next for Almanac

Our next steps would be to implement the following features: Add a voice feature with daily summaries Algorithm to anticipate schedule issues Syncing schedules with multiple other users of the website, so as to be able to arrange and co-ordinate events such as group projects and meetups with friends.