Inspiration
Our team consists of Tess Van Daele, Olivia Morkved, Derex Wangmang, and Jorge Tomaylla. We created an activities app targeted at kids ages 5-12. We call it Busy Beagles! It’s inspired by the fact that in quarantine, kids are the ones with the most unspent energy as they are stuck at home with little to do. We wanted to develop an app that provides them with activities to do during quarantine and even after in order to get them active and focused.
What it does
Our mobile app provides activities in five categories: Indoors, Outdoors, Health, Learning, and Fun. Kids can scroll through the activities, read descriptions, and add them to their to-do list. Kids can view their progress, complete tasks, or remove them from the to-do list. They can also use the Surprise page to quickly generate activity suggestions.
The app interface is simple enough that we anticipate young kids to be able to use it, so long as a parent helps with initial account creation and authorization. We store info on a cloud-based service so that the kids can log in on multiple devices or retain their acount if their device is stolen.
How we built it
We built our app through React Native, an open source Javascript framework. Originally, we considered alternatives such as Swift. However, we realized that first, not all of us have Macs, but second, through React Native we’d be able to deploy our app on both iOS and Android. This would allow us to reach a larger audience! We used Firebase for authentication and as a cloud database, and we used Expo as a framework which runs on top of React Native.
Challenges we ran into
Initially, we had a hard time choosing a name! We wanted something fun and catchy to communicate the fact that the app was for kids. At the same time, we wanted to convey the app's function, which was to provide activities and, hopefully, to temporarily cure quarantine-induced boredom. We decided that "Busy Beagles" convey a sense of fun and -- anyone with a dog knows they can entertain themselves for hours! (Curious about our runner-up name? It was Lion Learning App :) )
Another challenge was developing a kid-specific app, because we wanted to be sensitive about protecting kids' privacy. This was especially pertinent as we were using a cloud database. We decided to neither ask for nor store personal identifying info, other than the email used for account creation and first name. It would have been fun to add an "Age" or "Date of birth" -- but we considered the trade-off between additional features and privacy and decided to err on the side of privacy protection.
On the technical side of things, we were new to the languages and technologies that we used, which we talk about more below. While this was a challenge, we all felt like the purpose of the hackathon was to learn, and so we embraced it!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Everyone on the team either had zero or only a little bit of knowledge of Javascript. So, we did a ton of learning-on-the-go when it came to Javascript syntax and best practices, React Native features, and the Firebase API. In addition to this, only 1 out of the 4 teammates had prior experience with version control. We spent time learning how to navigate Git (commands, pull requests, and all that good stuff).
Furthermore, none of us knew each other before the start of the hackathon! Despite this, we had a lot of fun planning the idea for the app (which was inspired by a teammate's younger brother.) We are proud of how much we gelled as a team and of how we learned to work together.
What's next:
We will definitely be adding more activity ideas in each of the five categories (Indoors, Outdoors, Health, Learning, and Fun). (email us activity suggestions at: busybeaglesapp@gmail.com)
On the maintainance side of things, we also have some tweaks to make and Android-specific debugging to do to allow the app to be truly cross-platform.
In the future, we hope to make a parent-facing side of the app. Parents can link to their kids account and track their kid's progress in the app.
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