Inspiration
The amount of unproductive time we have spent as students in the past few months led us to find an innovative solution to change our life in quarantine for the better.
What it does
Using Imaginei5’s ideation process, we realized that the biggest issues that stall people’s productivity is not knowing where to start with something they want to accomplish, a lack of structure in their daily life, and an absence of social interaction. Thus, we created CoronaHacks to tackle these issues by providing students with useful tools to reach their goals. Our app give them structure and purpose for their days, and also supplies students with the option for learning through social interaction.
How I built it
Using Android Studio with the help of the workshop and our previous knowledge. We used Java for the hardcode and XML to format it. JSON along with Firebase would be used to take real-time courses, events, articles, and educational materials from the internet for each field of interest and level of difficulty.
To be specific, we incorporated familiar UI elements like buttons, textviews, edittexts (in the search bar) and spinners and divided and organized them based on color and difficulty. We used Intent to move from one page to another and to the browser, and we used a ListView (with adapters) and specifically formatted each item to make it pleasing to the eye with all the required information at hand. We also showed our UI to our parents and friends for feedback, using different layouts (LinearLayout, RelativeLayout, ScrollView...) with specific locations and layout weights for each item
to make the app as user-friendly as possible.
Challenges I ran into
- Formatting and making the UI seamless (only after rigorous feedback and do-overs)
- Less time to work on, especially since most of us are from Europe and one of our team members was in America (we pulled an all-nighter)
- Coming up with an original idea that solves all of our issues that we listed above and focused on the positives rather than the negatives of confinement (we spent more than 2 hours on ideation and planning)
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
- Successfully creating a working demo
- Making a presentation in one night
- Working amazingly with team members and using each of our strengths to our benefit
What I learned
- Android development skills
- How to present an app
- How to ideate
- How to work on a time crunch
- How to collaborate!
What's next for CoronaHacks
With more time we would use json parsing to access courses, events, articles, seminars, and other educational materials from the web to give real time suggestions to the user in order to pursue his or her interest in any subject, he or she desires. In order to expand this idea even more, ideally we would also include an email verified account login in order to save their preferences, personalize their experiences, and track their progress by making a customized schedule, and achievable goals.
Our Project Video (if needed): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1j1JTNACP16dy4TIoSxdH2GUkcnMPSwvx/view?usp=sharing
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