Hurdle

This is our Hurdle logo

Inspiration

The cofounders of Hurdle were inspired by three words: spontaneity, connectivity, and adventure.

What it does

The prototype allows users to choose groups of two or more to compete against one another in weekly Hurdles. A user hops the hurdle when they send a picture verifying that they successfully completed the randomized challenge. Once on the other side, the user gets to add a rule to the challenge, making it harder to complete for the remaining competitors. In a real-world application, users would go around their respective cities to complete the challenges via a mobile app. Today, we present to you an object-oriented program that provides a mere glimpse into the future of Hurdle.

How we built it

Using an object-oriented design, we created several classes that interact. We established classes that store and manipulate data, including text files, for our runners, groups, and races among groups.

Challenges we ran into

When drafting an idea for this hackathon, our team had big ambitions. We had too many ideas and too little time. Throughout the weekend, we realized that the only way to achieve large goals is to start with small ones. In order to make this project more tangible, we started simply by creating a class that holds data for our narrowest and most important grouping, the users themselves. The project naturally built upon itself, as we explored the interactions between essential classes, and our idea for the project become more concrete.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Full disclosure: we spent a solid half hour trying to come up with a name for this project. But it ultimately inspired our theme and gave us direction in specifying the user experience in a post-covid world. After two years of monotony, Hurdle aims to motivate users to actively reject the habitual routines we all fell into over the last few years and hurtle their way towards new experiences (pun intended).

What we learned

As freshman computer science majors at our respective universities, both of us came into this weekend open to new experiences, opportunities to learn, and the prospect of a whole lotta mistakes. As a team, we explored new IDEs, deepened our understanding of fundamental data structures, and learned how to creatively develop a program based on an original idea from scratch.