Canpanion

Inspiration

While brainstorming about problems that we regularly face as students, we all realized that one major issue that we face is burnout. The constant cycle of going to class, working on assignments, going to recitation/office hours and submitting assignments always leads to loss of motivation and burnout for a majority of the student population across the world.

To combat this burnout and give motivation to students, we came up with the idea of a "Canpanion", a Google Chrome extension that lives off of your assignments!

What it does

The "Canpanion" project allows students to adopt and care for a virtual pet whose well-being is directly correlated to the timeliness and completion of their assignments. Using a Canvas API, we retrieved student data and used it to send reminders to the students about their deadline. To help motivate students to want to submit before there assignments due date, the Canpanions feeding system is dependent on whether or not the students finish there work on time. When an assignments due date is approaching, the virtual pet will appear as "hungry". Once the assignment is turned in, the virtual pet will be happy and will appear as "full".

How we built it

To create the backend for the application, we used the Canvas API in Python. This allowed us to query information about a student using their Canvas Secret that is provided by Canvas for free. Using their functions, we got a list of open assignments without submissions, and then used the data to scale how the pet is feeling at this moment.

Late assignments make the pet feel worse, and it gets worse the later the assignment is submitted.

For the front end design, we had two of our teammates work on 2 different variations of pets to implement in our code.

Challenges we ran into

Our team did not have prior knowledge about creating chrome extensions and therefore we had trouble using the interface and getting permissions to access the canvas API. We also had trouble implementing our drawings into the HTML code as this was our first time using animations along with plain HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

we are proud that we were able to combine two skills of graphic design as well as code to reflect an appealing yet technically advanced vision.

What we learned

we learned how to use the Canvas API, as well as merge gifs into chrome extensions and visualize your academic performance. We also learned how to combine a Python flask app and a JavaScript front end to make a fully functional application.

What's next for Canpanion

Canpanion still has a long way to go. Firstly, we would create different pets that a person can adopt so theres more variety. Also, we will implement a system where, depending on the final grades that a user achieves, the pets will evolve reflecting on the efforts that a student put in their classes.