LexHack Planner

This android app helps students plan out their time.

Comment

Inspiration

Something that I, as a student, struggle with is time management. Too often I find myself awake at 1am rushing to complete a homework assignment, cram for a test, or the dreaded read 100 pages (and take notes) assignment. In fact, even while making an app to help me plot my time out better, I barely got any sleep because I pushed off starting until it was too late. Hence, I started to ask myself, why does this always happen? As I reflected on my day, I realized that it was because I did not manage my time properly! Right after school, I would go on my phone and scroll through endless pages of videos, or start playing video games with my friends until dark. I decided that, in order to reduce stress, improve my grade, and get more much needed sleep, an app that helps me divide out my day efficiently would be very beneficial.

What it does

LexHack Planner is an Android app that has a calendar which is set to the current month, with the current day highlighted, but you can click through to reach different months. In this calendar, you can select a week, and in this week, you can select a day to add an event to.

How I built it

I am doing this hackathon solo, so I made this without any teammates. I used Android Studio to make my project, and followed multiple YouTube tutorials on how to make my project run. The language I used was Java. In order to test my app, I used an Android emulator.

Challenges I ran into

Due to the limited time, I was not able to complete everything I planned on. For example, although I coded the weekly calendar, the app crashes when I try to go to it. I did not have time to debug this. I also did not have time to finish the add new event feature, but I do have it laid out, just not completely coded yet. Finally, because of unclear tutorials and just me being somewhat new to Android Studio, there were multiple small bugs, but I was able to fix those by using Android Studio's context actions, intuition, and everybody programmer's best friend, Stack Overflow.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Simply making my app and submitting it into my first hackathon is a big enough accomplishment for me. Now that I look back at it, there were multiple, complex layers of code that I barely can understand now! In addition, the fact that I was able to complete and learn so much in just 2 days is astonishing, even to myself.

What I learned

Before taking on this big project, I had some experience with Android studio before, and I am also in the USACO silver division. But, my experience with Java during USACO was more about algorithms, and this app required different skills such as classes, interfaces, and things that I don't know the name of. I also learned xml, because Android Studio uses that for formatting, visual, and front end things.

What's next for LexHack Planner

First, I would spend some time polishing up my app and actually accomplishing the original goals of this app. Then, I would probably add a to-do list tab, so you can see things you need to do more easily. Finally, I would connect it to a database. In the past, I used Google Firebase, so I would probably use that as I have some experience with it.

Share this project:

Updates