LILA (means play in Hindi and the color violet in German)

LILA is a web app that curates mindfulness themed content for children. Its simple interface allows children, educators and parents to find quality resources that encourage mindfulness.

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Inspiration

LILA is a web app created for children. There were many reasons for building this app, the primary one being that while there are many mindfulness resources catering to adults, there are very few resources curated just for children. We wanted to create a one-stop website where children could access age appropriate stories, music, art activities, guided meditations, nutrition resources. Annemarie has worked with children during her year abroad in Bolivia and Aanchal has worked as a primary school teacher in the US and India. We both felt the need for creating a resource that could not only help children, but also be used by educators and parents.

What it does

LILA is a curation of quality, child-friendly resources relating to emotional and social awareness, body awareness and mindfulness techniques using art, music and movement.

How we built it

Since we had little experience of coding, we used a template to help us with HTML designing. We imported our content into the HTML templates on Virtual Studio Code. We used images from Unsplash, Freepic and videos from Youtube.

Challenges we ran into

We initially started off by creating our webapp using Flask, Python, HTML and CSS. Upon setting up the basic code with the help of tutorials, we realized that it would take a long time to modify and create an attractive, appealing web app design with our limited coding knowledge. We then changed our strategy and decided to use a free template from the internet to create a website instead. We customised this template for our app on Visual Studio Code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were proud that we were able to create a website that had a simple design. We couldn't finish the project, but we were able to see our project vision clearly in our end product.

What we learned

We got to learn many tools like XCode, Flask, Replit, VSC, Github that could be used for collaborating, running code, creating web apps. Getting mentor help and networking helped us reflect on our process and how we could begin something big by visualizing the small, practical steps that we need to take. We also learnt that in order to create an app, it takes an incredible amount of focus, flexibility to deal with unforeseen challenges and considerable amount of coding knowledge.

What's next for LILA

We hope to continue to add more resources on LILA by way of personalizing content and getting user feedback (through feedback forms on the web app). We are also curious to see if we can use AI algorithms to filter and find child-friendly, mindfulness themed content on the Internet.

Because of difference timezones, we will not demo our project live. The link to the YouTube Video is listed below.

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