Lum-A-Life

Getting Sorted into a Career Path
UI/UX Design is perfect for you!
Learn through Interactive Models
Compete with you team members to earn points!
Become the Head Boy/Girl of you House!

Inspiration

We are passionate about helping incoming freshmen with their development and facilitating their learning journey. Through this app idea, we would like to tackle the problems that we faced as freshmen and ease the transition for future students. When we spoke to our professors, they mentioned that many computer science majors are doing well on the technical side of the major but lack communication and leadership skills, which are essential when entering the workforce. We wanted to create an app that can help enhance such skills to help students with their transition into the workforce after they graduate.

What it does

The first thing the app does is take the student to a career quiz. Similar to the sorting hat in Harry Potter, the quiz gives the student a category, or a “house” to focus on to improve their skills in the computer science field. The four “houses” are UI/UX design, machine learning, software engineering, and computer architecture. The student can then play interactive games to enhance their knowledge in that specific field. There is also a page that has general tasks students can complete that will help with their communication skills, leadership, social skills, and more. Throughout the interactive games and the career potion tasks, the students can earn points and compete with their friends on the app. We want this app to motivate students to work on their people skills along with the technical side of their science-based majors.

How we built it

We began building the concept of our app by creating the frontend outline using figma. With figma we designed a Harry Potter themed UI. To expand of the frontend and include a bit of backend functionality, we used XML and Kotlin.

Challenges we ran into

One of the challenges that we faced was ideation and better connecting it to the design. We had many broad ideas but found it difficult to narrow our business model so that it solved one specific problem. On the technical side, we faced some issues translating are ambitious ideas to XML and Koitlin so that we could have functionality in the app demo. We wanted to have much more complex functions but we decided to stick to straightforward actions that would be within means of our small knowledge of the languages. We also faced some Github errors with pushing all our project changes to the remote repository. While the process was hard, we learned a lot through these challenges and hope to keep improving our app in the future.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to implement different interactive components that allow freshmen to have easy access to resources. Additionally, they can have a positive experience with the app. We were able to work together and come up with a feasible solution together. We were successfully able to communicate and better present ideas by implementing our diverse educational backgrounds. Working on this project, was rewarding for us when we were able to have the code completely run through in the formats we liked. We were also satisfied that we were able to completely give an example of what an activity would look like and present it on a phone. We hope that these activities can be used to help students with their development and transition into UTD.

What we learned

Throughout the designing process, we learned to use Figma efficiently. This allows us to experiment and rely more on Figma than other applications. In the beginning, we faced challenges with keeping the layers organized. Additionally, our group members have diverse backgrounds, from computer science majors to psychology majors. Because of this, we also benefited by improving our teamwork skills since we had different views and ideas when we initially started on our app. Furthermore, we were not too familiar with HTML before developing this app, so we learned a lot of content to work on this project. Overall, these challenges allowed us to explore, learn, and improve different aspects of designing and coding.

What's next for Lum-A-Life

We plan on expanding more on the advising aspect to make the program more personalized for students. This allows each student to have guidance throughout their academic journey. We also plan on aiding students with their productivity and easing their stress. Additionally, we are interested in focusing and expanding on various skills in the future that will help with resume building. We also want to look into adding a reward system where students can spend points on new characters that can be unlocked in the game. Overall, we would love for there to be good community involvement as a result of developing our app, and we hope that this program can help students have a better transition both into the freshman experience and out of college into the workforce.