Check-In Chicken

Check-In Chicken is a Google Chrome Extension which helps students, coders, or anyone else to practice healthy and productive studying/working habits, as well as promote mental health while doing so.

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Inspiration

Given the circumstances of the world right now, mental health is steadily being ignored. This is especially bad with students. So we developed a relatively unobtrusive way of checking in with yourself, your mental health, and the world, all while being productive!

What it does

We developed a Chrome Extension that helps you stay on task for certain set "focus times" and gives you free time for timed breaks, as well as a "mental health vibe check" in order to provide needed reassurance and helpful tips to a productive and healthy work environment. Check-In Chicken is made to help you be productive, but not at the cost of your mental health.

How we built it

Using resources such as Google Developer, we created the chrome web extension.

Challenges we ran into

The Pomodoro-style timer was difficult to implement, as it features two distinct timers cycling through each other to monitor work-time and break-time. This challenge was highlighted the inability for chrome extensions to store data meaningfully without the use of database. Learning the structure of how Chrome extensions work, as well as how to make them efficient was difficult, as none of us had developed one before. The check-in implementation was also difficult to implement, as we wanted to check-in on the user occasionally without disturbing their workflow, and providing them with meaningful mental health support. Developing the UI/UX to be approachable and friendly, while also capable and straightforward was a challenge as well, but one we believe we overcame.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Developing the UI/UX to be approachable and friendly, while also capable and straightforward was a challenge as well, but one we believe we overcame with our mascot Gappy. None of our team-members have worked with Chrome Extensions before, with most of our experience with standard web apps. The Pomodoro-style timer was surprisingly complex to develop within the confines of Chrome Extension's capabilities, so developing a working timer was a really big win for us.

What we learned

CSS is a difficult language. Google Maps API is a silly goose. You can create a Chrome Extension under 10 minutes.

What's next for Check-In Chicken

We wish to integrate more helpful tips into our Check-In's, so that people struggling to focus or have a hard time staying positive in a work environment have even more resources and support from Check-In Chicken, beyond what we have supported. There were a lot of API's we toyed with which did a varying amount of things, so being able to integrate all of our mental health support would be amazing and ideal.

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