Beats to the Step

Something more annoying than your music stopping when you're walking or running outside is the beat of the music not aligning with that of your footsteps... we can fix that.

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Inspiration

Let’s be honest… who doesn’t listen to music on their way to school or while on a quick morning run?

While brainstorming for ideas, our group agreed that listening to music was a necessity while traveling — especially on foot. There’s really nothing more satisfying than matching your footsteps to the beat of the music.

But of course, no one can deny how discomfiting it is when you're walking or running outside and the beat of the music isn’t aligning with that of your footsteps...

So, as music lovers who also like running (well, at least some of us), we thought, what better way to hit two birds with one stone than to create an app that focuses on both?

What it does

Beats to the Step is a mobile app that allows you to find the perfect music with the perfect BPM (beats per minute) for your everyday walk or run. This way, your music will always align with the pace and frequency of your footsteps!

How we built it

To verify whether our idea would benefit other users, we did some research and found data regarding the effects of music on individuals’ walking behaviours, where we found out the optimal running tempo for synchronization with music was 120bpm to 140bpm.

We began by drawing a sketch of how each of our app’s pages would look and function, considering a user interface that would be easy for anyone to use.

Using Flutter and Android Studio, allowing us to easily build user-friendly apps, we began to bring our idea into reality!

Challenges we ran into

As it was our first hackathon, we were ambitious to pitch in new ideas and dove into something that we’d never done before: app design. We spent a lot of time learning how to use new software development kits like Flutter and getting used to Dart.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re extremely proud that we were able to come up with an idea that all of us were satisfied with and that we managed to scrap together something. Most of all, we had a lot of fun here and we’ve definitely made the most out of this hackathon, going to workshops and meeting new hackers, as well as THERAPY DOGS!!

What we learned

As stated above, it was our first time doing anything close to app development and we’re proud that we’ve now all gotten some exposure in this field. Thanks to this experience, we’ve got a sense of how hackathons are generally run and will certainly do a better job of time management next time. During this journey, we were also reminded of the most important rule that we’d forgotten… constantly saving our code…

What's next for Beats to the Step

There are many things we can improve on — from allowing users to create their own playlists which can be sorted according to BPM on our app to making the design of the app more consistent.

Happy BTS-ing (Beats to the Step-ing) 👍

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