Clocked In

Inspiration

Our inspiration came from our personal issue with staying focused and studying due to the distraction of phones and social media. One of our teammates is in a psychology course and explained how people are most negatively impacted by metrics and numbers on social media such as number of likes, followers, views, etc. We decided to take that negative element and put a positive spin on numbers by creating a social media for studying without the harmful implications. We want students to interact with peers in similar classes to them, have a space to reach out to people with similar academic interests, and have a website that helps them focus on their studies!

What it does

The program allows for students to create an account where they have a personal dashboard which displays the courses they are in and their weekly progress with points. There is a timer which they can start and based on the amount of time they spend studying, they get additional points. The leaderboard displays the top students for the week. There is a chat feature where you can reach out to other students and a search feature where you can search for other students in your courses.

How we built it

We split the frontend and backend between four people, with two people working on frontend and two people on the backend. We used React to create a homepage, login page, registration page, a leaderboard, chat, search feature, and a timer. Then, in the backend we created two databases, one for the accounts and one for conversations in the chat. The backend used flask, sql, and redis to manage the accounts and the courses. The timer points were calculated by storing the time and then subtracting the start and end time to get the total amount of time studied.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into challenges while integrating the frontend with the backend as there were 3 different servers that we would have to use, so some portions of the frontend aren't fully functional as we couldn't merge all 3 servers onto one.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to create a product that can promote wellbeing for students and foster enthusiasm for learning, and we are also proud that we were able to learn so much in 24 hours. Our favorite feature is the timer and is the feature we are most proud of as it is a dynamic element of our website.

What we learned

We all learned new things regarding development, our frontend team learned how to use React for the first time and the backend team learned how to use SQL and Flask. We also learned how different servers interact which each other, so we are excited to implement this in the future.