HomeworkOut

Inspiration

At the moment, most students are doing most things from their houses. This can be a good thing, but it has been mostly a bad thing for me and most of my friends. We need to be in class or in a library to concentrate and always being at the house is making us very unfocused. All the gyms are closed, so most of us have don't have very good healthy habits at the moment.

What it does

That's why I created this timer called HomeworkOut which will guide us through this cycle of 3 minute bodyweight workouts, 22 minute session of intense focus and 5 minute break. This is based on the pomodoro technique but it also incorporates bodyweight exercices, since any types of exercise is A LOT better than none (src: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/how-much-exercise-do-you-really-need-less-than-you-think-201512088770) Also, physical activity help humans get into this state of mind called FLOW, in which we are extremely focused, creative and productive.

How we built it

I used HTML to make the webapp. Then, I added javascript scripts to make interactive and to also make the logic of the timer. I made the background image and all the images/art on the website using photoshop (for the drawings) and adobe animate (for the gifs). I then added scripts on the backend (PHP) to make it save users' stats. The stats (hours studied, working out) will be shown on the main page, to encourage others to be productive.

Challenges we ran into

It was hard to design everything and fix all the bugs in 2 days. The asynchronous javascript functions like setInterval and setTimeout and clearTimeout were something that were hard to work with and I didn't have too much experience with those functions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am proud to have finished it on time. The site is full stack (has a backend and a database) It records data and works well. I can finally use it and it is up and running on a public server on my domain mathusan.net.