Call of the Wild

Pandemic induced depression is at an all-time high. Call of the Wild seeks to use gamification principles to encourage users to participate in daily outdoor activities.

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Inspiration

Over this past year, we have spent countless hours a day indoors without any outdoor activity. Recent studies have shown that prolonged time indoors is connected to depression and binge drinking in young adults. It is at these times that an outside factor pushing us to move around is necessary. That's why we made this app to gamify the act and jumpstart outdoor interests.

What it does

The app picks a random location in a radius around the user as a goal to walk to. After reaching the target the daily streak increases by one incentivizing daily activity.

How we built it

For this project, we used React Native for the frontend and Node.js for the backend. All of the graphics for the app were designed collaboratively beforehand in Figma. The backend was created with Express.js and talks to the Google Cloud API to generate a random location snapped to nearby roads along with directions to said location.

Challenges we ran into

Throughout the process, we discovered and refined ideas that we had going into the hackathon. Many of which have changed and been removed as the project developed. We also ran into development environment problems prompting us to quickly adapt to stay on track with our morphing plan.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

In the end, all of the significant functionality we anticipated at the beginning of the project is complete and implemented to our satisfaction. We have a backend that interacts with google cloud to generate a random location and the directions to said location. On the frontend side, we communicated with the backend server ultimately rendering a recommended walking path for the user. The interface is intuitive and easy to use.

What we learned

None of us have ever worked in React-Native before, developing for the mobile platform. Coming from a purely React background, it was hard getting used to the differences that are so hard ingrained from web development. We also delved deeply into the backend side of mobile development, communicating with an authenticated 3rd party API.

What's next for Call of the Wild

Some ideas beforehand were not implemented, like a monetary component or a data collection aspect for personal habits research. We would also like to deploy the app to the Google Play Store for everyone to use, hopefully, to make an impact on people currently unmotivated to leave the house. Whether that is only one person or the whole world.

Random Locations. Walking. Daily Streaks. Healthy. Fun.

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