inSTEP

Helping children to step, jog or run into the post-covid world.

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Inspiration:

After consulting with a trainee primary school teacher we established the difficulties of holding online/Zoom PE lessons for children. We decided to create a system that would allow teachers to hold fitness competitions during their online lectures.

What it does:

Our system integrates a mobile app that children can download alongside a live website where teachers can create classes and begin fitness challenges. The app collects pedometer data from the child's phone - this data is streamed to a live leaderboard on the website.

How we built it

We built inSTEP in three core sections; the mobile front-end, the website front-end and the backend. For the mobile front-end we used Unity powered by an AWS SDK which connects to core AWS Lambda functions to establish communication with an AWS DynamoDB and the website front-end. The latter was created using raw HTML, CSS and JavaScript. We worked collaboratively using Github and Zoom for the duration of the hackathon.

Challenges we ran into

The primary challenge we faced was using AWS for the first time, we struggled with its implementation in both the backend and the frontend connections. We discovered the AWS SDK does not work in Unity which proved too tricky to overcome. In hindsight we spent the majority of our time trying to figure out how to use AWS, especially surrounding AWS Lambda functions and the API triggers.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We created two independent frontends that successfully communicated with each other through a backend. We worked well as a team by supporting and helping each other and distributing core tasks between us. We created a functional prototype which worked well in mobile simulations.

What We learned

We gained core experience in using AWS as a backend for web apps, primarily surrounding the interactions between the front-end systems and the core backend Lambda functions. Learning about the AWS API Gateway and REST APIs was particularly interesting for us. Suzi learnt how to get JavaScript to communicate with the backend using the AWS JavaScript SDK, she also learnt how to make a single page web app. Dan and Edward learnt a lot about AWS and its core facilities.

What's next for inSTEP

Ideally we would like to correct the issues with our mobile APK, most likely using HTTP requests rather than the AWS SDK. In the future we would also like to adapt the system to include different types of fitness challenges, for example using the gyroscope sensor to measure swinging etc. Potentially we could add a way for a teacher to specify how they want to use the data collected. It would be great to see this system used in primary schools in the local area.

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