Fitness Application

Inspiration

    With this being our first hackathon ever, we wanted to select a project that would teach us new and valuable skills while also challenging the knowledge we brought into the competition.  With the exception of one of our members, who is currently taking Programming Fundamentals 2, we are all taking Programming Fundamentals 1 this semester.   Our friend suggested we choose a fitness tracking app, as it falls under the health category and would be a good first project for new programmers.  We believe it can be really helpful to anyone struggling with calorie counting and understanding correct caloric intake as well as recommended/necessary protein.

What it does

     Our program will take height, weight, age, gender, activity level, and unit (lb/kg, cm/ft and in) inputs from the user.  The user will also select cut, bulk, or maintenance depending on if they want to lose, gain, or maintain their weight.  The program will then provide recommended daily calorie and protein intake based on the user input.  The user will then be able to track their daily calories and grams of protein by adding the meals they ate in a day, as well as caloric and protein intake for the entire week.  As an extra fun feature, we also added a trivia mini game that will quiz the user on fitness and fitness history facts.

Challenges we ran into

     Python is the only language we could work with as a group, so we were somewhat limited by our knowledge and what we could feasibly accomplish using this language in 24 hours.  Our friend also recommended using pygame as our user interface, so we spent the first 7 hours of our project teaching ourselves pygame and attempting to use it to create our calorie counter.  It was very slow going, tedious, and admittedly frustrating as we were trying to create something while learning the path to creating it.  Just as we were getting the hang of it, a fellow competitor recommended we use tkinter instead.  After testing tkinter, we liked the aesthetics and the code better and decided to completely scrap what we had done with pygame.  We worked with tkinter for the remaining hours.  While we enjoyed the style of tkinter more than pygame, it was still an uphill battle as we also had to teach this to ourselves.