FOKUS

Inspiration

Wanting to get involved and find meaningful opportunities to fill your free time but simply not receiving the proper resources to do so? Searching countless hours to find something of interest but have it not fit into your schedule? As busy university students, we have first-hand experience on the issue of time management. It has become successively more difficult for students to utilize their free time for meaningful, purposeful, and valuable experiences. Much of the reason relating to a lack of resources and the burden of timely research.

What it does

FOKUS strives to eliminate the issue surrounding students not having the time to find events due to time-related conflicts. With the customizable design, students build their profiles with their own interests and sync their school/daily calendars. When a gap is detected in their schedule the means of filtering for experiences related to their interests are recommended to them through FOKUS. The initiative to sign up for events through the app is feasible as well, as the ability to turn on location services for a better selection of events nearest to you. FOKUS is hopeful in giving students purpose and meaningful experiences to gain outer perspectives and become better individuals.

How we built it

We first discussed the potential functions within the app and from then, sketch out the different screens and the user flow. Based on the sketches, we used Figma to create an interactive prototype to convey our ideas.

Challenges we ran into

First, we did not realize the great amount of time it takes to create an idea. However, we were able to collaborate and listen to each other's ideas to create FOKUS. We ran into some technical challenges, but we were able to produce a realistic prototype which demonstrated our idea effectively.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

From brainstorming to developing a unique idea in less than 24 hours, we developed an idea that we believe can help improve our productivity, well-being and enrich our knowledge in diverse fields during leisure time. Through collaboration, we were able to brainstorm multiple sessions which allowed to achieve an interactive prototype.

What we learned

During this experience, our whole team was able to learn more about the business creation process, the design aspects of an application and the basics of coding for an application. We were able to develop valuable strategies for brainstorming ideas and creating a clear plan so that we could successfully execute our idea. A few of our members were introduced to the software called Figma. This is a useful software that allows users to create a prototype of their application that shows a realistic vision of the actual app.

What's next for FOKUS

Implementation of our platform! During StarterHacks we focused more on the design and potential functionality of our application. We believe that our project does have a lot of potential in improving how individuals spend their time, and now want to research what technologies we need to learn to make our idea come to life.

Presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1vMI-zgTvkr2PS74C5MPVozDq2POsx6cBpdK6BtvmtWU/edit?usp=sharing