Inspiration

As young athletes ourselves, we know that keeping up with a proper diet and developing good nutritional habits can be a challenge. So we came up with something that teaches young athletes the do’s and don'ts about diet, and how to get in their best shape. We decided on a diet and reminder personalizable app that helps athletes meet their personal goals. As we are learning in biology this year, it is important to understand the science behind the way different foods can be beneficial to overall health and athletic performance. Training and competing requires large amounts of energy, which comes from carbohydrates, fats and proteins. If you do not consume enough of these macronutrients in your diet, your body will not be able to perform at your peak level of performance. We want our app to be a learning tool that leaves young athletes with a greater understanding and better habits that they can carry forward throughout their lives.

Solution

We created this all-in-one app called AthlEAT, to increase the performance of young athletes. This app is important when helping keep athletes on track with their personal goals, stay motivated, and be informed. We included many variations of meals depending on your sport, based on the three categories: strength, endurance, and speed. We also had a To-Do list to go along with the meal plans. This will help the athlete stay organized and remember what to eat and when. Another helpful aspect in our app is that we have a built in BMI Calculator, depending on your sport and criteria's. You would put in your height and weight and the calculator would give you a recommended meal plan. This can be counted as a check in for the athlete and progress check.

What it does

This is our app, AthlEAT, it is an app that provides nutritional information on meals suited for a sport or physical activity. This is the home page. When you click into the app, this is what you will see. The “Start Your Journey” button on the home screen brings you to a page where we have grouped sports and types of physical activities into 3 categories: strength, endurance, and speed. Depending on your sport or workout goals, you pick a category which will bring you to a variety of meal plans made specifically for that type of training and your intended time frame. All meals include nutritional info describing the balance of carbs, fats, and proteins. Since educating athletes is one of the main goals of our app, we have included an entire section dedicated to in-depth explanations of the foods we recommend to our athletes. This page can be accessed by clicking here on the home screen. As mentioned earlier, the nutritional information below our meal plans makes it so users can then go to this education page and learn more about the value of these foods. We also offer more examples of foods that have similar nutritional benefits, so athletes interested in incorporating other ingredients with specific nutritional value can make their own custom meals, which they can then add to their calendar. To access the calendar, click the last button on the home screen. It will bring you to a custom calendar that reminds you when to eat the recommended foods. You simply set a date from when you want to eat nutritional food and enter it into the calendar. Then it will remind you accordingly. Your information will be saved in the app, so whenever you come back all your reminders, dates, and information will be saved. Along with our diet calendar, we also have a BMI calculator so athletes can track their weight in order to eat the right foods to gain muscle, healthy fats, or anything else they are planning. You easily input your weight and height, and learn your BMI along with many tips on what to eat in that range and explanations to help learn too! It is very important for athletes to know their BMI. For example, lean body mass contributes to quickness, speed, agility, and overall performance. By reducing non-essential body fat, you can enhance muscular and cardiorespiratory endurance, so endurance athletes, such as runners, benefit from low body fat and lower BMI. A runner could use our BMI calculator in conjunction with our smart diet calendar and customized meal planning to track their weight, lower their BMI, and become a better athlete.

How we built it

We built AthlEAT using the MIT App Inventor software. This software was a new experience for our team and was a new learning process for us. We were able to figure out how to use the software and navigate it during our weekly meetings over a couple of months.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many challenges while creating this app. One main struggle was that the software we worked on could only have one person working on it at once. We could not share it and have multiple people working on it at the same time. But to solve this, we were able to make virtual meetings and worked out the code together. Another problem was choosing a device to show the app, as depending on a device, the app would be formatted more differently than another. To solve this problem, we were able to experiment with the different sizes to see which would fit for all of the devices.

What we learned.

While creating AthlEAT, we learned how to code on the MIT Inventor Software. Designing an app was a new thing our team had to learn. We had to design our app depending on the age group we were focusing on; colorful and simple to be child-friendly, or more neat and serious. We also had multiple things on our app to make it more useful and to make things more compact. Rather than having 3 different apps, Athlete provides a BMI calculator, recommended meal plans, and a reminder section, all in one.

What's next of AthlEAT

This app should be used as a stepping stone for athletes to help themselves feel more confident and truly excel in their sport. We hope that our app will help more athletes in the future, and teach them good habits that they can carry forward throughout their lives.

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