Focuz

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Inspiration

We are a group of students who have seen the devastating effects of the pandemic on our school days. We had to contend with online learning instead of face-to-face lessons in school, and we realize how tough it is to focus when we are e-learning. Teachers and students alike are frustrated by the challenge of focusing during online classes. We were therefore inspired to create this project in the hopes of assisting students with focusing on their web courses and achieving better despite the pandemic.

What it does

Our project addresses the issue of students being unable to concentrate during online classes under the pandemic. One of the primary features we provide is the ability to display to users the precise time they have focused - we track how long they have been focusing in their classes using motion sensors. When they look away from the screen and our website detects that they are not paying attention, alerts are delivered to remind them to return to class. Our platform also allows users to ban some other websites that could potentially distract them, which helps them focus even more. Users can check their statistics to see how long they've been focusing and are rewarded based on how long they've been focusing, encouraging them to keep attentive during e-learning.

How we built it

While working on our project, we first brainstorm what functions our application should have, then divide the job amongst ourselves and work independently. We meet on a regular basis to keep each other updated on our progress and to put the pieces together. Finally, we solved some inconsistent parts (debugging) together and tested out the application.

Challenges we ran into

Many issues arise when we combine our pieces together because we operate individually on different parts. For example, issues with importing packages, run-time errors caused by minor modifications, finding a good model for face detection, and handling the OpenCV-Python application, to name a few. We use our frequent meetings to debug together so that everyone is working on the most recent version. We learned a lot more as a result of the hurdles we had on our way to completing this project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to implement the machine learning algorithm, and created a very user-friendly interface. This is the first hackathon for most of us, so we were very proud of what we have accomplished in such a short time frame.

What we learned

We've picked up a lot of new skills that we think will help us in the future, such as HTML templates and UI design layouts, flask development, and using HTML with python. More importantly, we learned how to collaborate with others using github, how to explain your code with comments and the importance of communication with your teammates.

What's next for Focuz

For future development, we hope that Focuz could be downloaded as an application on users' computers. This can provide much more convenience for users. Secondly, apart from blocking websites, we hope that computer applications can also be blocked in order to make users be more focused since there would be fewer distractions. Thirdly, we should develop an audio alert for users when they are not focusing for a certain period. Lastly, peripheral devices such as smartphones and iPad may be linked to Focuz to reduce distractions from these devices.