eduCATe

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Team Purrfect ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Inspiration

It’s super easy to get distracted. There's Netflix, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and the list goes on! Students may not be able to resist the temptation to pick up that phone while studying, and honestly, we're guilty of that ourselves.That's why we built eduCATe to help students focus on their studies by incentivizing uninterrupted 30/60/90 minute study periods! With COVID-19 on the loose, almost all students were forced into distanced learning which has led to a decline in productivity and a decrease in the quality of education. We saw that the estimated educational loss if students return to school by Fall 2020 is projected to be around 3.1 months of learning loss and a whopping 232,000 additional high school dropouts and we want to help!

So we set out to build eduCATe to help others retain their focus while studying. With this app, we hope to increase productivity, encourage, and motivate students to study for uninterrupted periods of time and you even get to collect cool cats!

What it does

Users can either create an account or log in to an existing one. They can get started with studying by selecting their target study time and when their goal is reached, they are rewarded with a random cute kitty to add to their collection! If users exit out while the timer is counting down, the app will stop the study session and they won't be rewarded with a cute kitty :(.

How we built it

Android Studio, Java, Firebase (encryption, creating & storing user information), Photoshop

Challenges we ran into

Mariam had a lot of difficulty with setting up the environment because the emulator was not loading in properly on her computer. As a workaround, she connected the app to load on her phone. She also encountered difficulties with getting a bottom navigation bar and setting up a screen manager to allow the user to browse each screen.

Cindy spent a lot of time trying to integrate Firebase with the app to allow users to save and store their information for the next session. It was her first time working with any databases so she had to read up on tons of documentation and find solutions online when things broke.

Juana had difficulty setting up the emulator. She was not able to download the driver that was required in order for the emulator to work. As a result, she used her phone for testing instead. In addition, she had issues with getting images to show up in the collections page.

Heaven had a hard time formatting pictures into the home page, and coming up with a nice design. After a lot of communication and trial and error she found that a simple page would be the best option setting a nice clean tone for the rest of the app. She also ran into some GitHub errors that she worked through.

As a team, we were unsure of what direction to take our project in. We thought about using Python with Kivy and KivyMD to design our android app but we later decided to switch to using Android Studio for our development process. Despite not knowing anything about Android app development but a little bit of Java, we were able to pull through through with hard work, some caffeine, a lot of help from the internet and reading a ton of documentation to create an app that we are proud of!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are so proud of our final product! Everyone achieved so much as beginner app developers. Creating a functional app was something we have all wanted to do but did not know how to begin so this was a great first step into software development for all of us. We were able to create a sign up and log in page with user authentication with Firebase, a simple yet nice home screen, a nifty looking study screen with a timer actively counting down and finally, a neat collections page to get people hyped about studying!

What we learned

Overall, the whole project was a great learning experience for all of us. Since most of this was new to us, we were able to learn a lot about the process of creating an android app.

On one hand, we learned about how crucial it is to always communicate so that nobody was left behind in the process. We also learned how important it was to properly plan and manage our time so that we could get the basic functionality of our project working first before focusing on extra features.

On the other hand, we honed our software developing skills by challenging ourselves to create an android app for the first time. It was also our first time setting up a database and we were glad to have gained experience in this useful skill since so many applications rely on databases nowadays. We had many issues from struggling to set up the environment, to version control conflicts, to debugging the code, but we learned how to fix them (plus some valuable tricks!) and we plan to carry that with us into our future projects and endeavors!

What's next for eduCATe

Although eduCATe is not totally complete, there are still a variety of features that we wanted to implement in the future! We want to expand the collection of cats and possibly even implement a rarity feature so that users are motivated to study for longer periods of time at a chance to obtain rarer cats. In addition, we hope to add a coin system to reward the user for every minute they spend studying and incentivize the user to continue studying and for longer periods of time.

We were also looking to implement a google maps API to locate the nearest library or cafe in order to improve the user’s experience studying with eduCATe. Nothing better than an ambient, relaxing place to crack open a book!