Homework Harvest

Homework Harvest transforms studying into an engaging experience by gamifying learning—students complete homework to collect pumpkins, earn coins and grow their own virtual vegetable gardens.

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Inspiration

Achieving high marks is difficult without the right habits, and many people struggle for years to build a good work ethic.

What it does

In order to revolutionize learning, we created “Homework Harvest” a web application that aims to make studying more enjoyable and rewarding. There is a to-do list at the top of the screen where you can list all your homework, upcoming tests or projects that you want to work on. There is a timer function that can be used to further motivate students to complete their assignments, rather than procrastinate them. Each task you complete, spawns a type of vegetable (e.g. pumpkins and peppers). By moving your character using WASD keys or the arrows on screen for mobile, you can move to collect these vegetables. Each one has a value ranging from 50 to 150 coins. Using your coins, you can open the shop and purchase new outfits for your character as well as vegetable seeds to gain power ups. The goal of the app is to increase students productivity and to make studying and completing homework much more fun and far less tedious.

How we built it

We built the app using a wide variety of tools and AI. We used Perplexity AI for research, Claude AI to help debug, and ChatGPT for generic requests. In order to create the physical app we used react native expo, incorporated the help of CoPilot into our code and designed components such as characters, shops items and vegetables using pixel art.

Challenges we ran into

One of the challenges we ran into was merging branches to keep track of our work. Merges messed up the work that we had already done, and our web app wouldn't run at all. Once we were able to fix the merges there were far more bugs in the code than there were before. Additionally, with almost all the members of our group being beginner coder's, we struggled to learn how to use all the new platforms for the first time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud that we eventually learned how to do merges properly! It was incredibly rewarding when we were finally able to make it work. Some other accomplishments that we're proud of are learning how to code different features such as weather, world exploring, incorporating physics in character movement and including digital art in our project.

What we learned

Through this process we learned how to work together as a team to solve problems. Often, when one person was struggling, working together to try to solve the problem was far more successful than working on it alone. We also learned how to better use AI to enhance our code, how to draw pixel art and incorporate it into our project, as well as learning aspects of sound engineering. All of these skills are very useful, and we will all apply them into many more projects to come.

What's next for Homework Harvest

With more time we would've loved to code even more vegetable options to create differing coin values, and to sell more seed options in the shop that will create more power-ups. We also want to incorporate authentication, in order to create individual accounts for each user that will save their previous data (such as coins collected, tasks completed, and items bought in the store). On top of this, we'd like to create a function that requires users to upload photo proof of their completed homework to guarantee that users make use of the app as they are supposed to. In order to do this and other additions similar to it, we would like to make more use of API's in future work. There are many small changes and improvements we want to make to our app that would further improve it and allow it to create and even bigger difference in the educational world.

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