Meditative Pomodoro

Meditative Pomodoro is a web application that promotes healthy studying habits by incorporating the Pomodoro studying technique and healthy mental health activities.

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Inspiration

Our team was inspired to make a meditative Pomodoro timer because we have all used the Pomodoro method to study at some point in our college careers. However, we also wanted to include some mental health benefits, so we decided we wanted to add prompts that the user can complete in order to help their mental health. Ultimately, we landed on showing the prompts during the user's break so that they are able to take a breather but also stay away from distracting alternatives, like phones or TVs.

What it does

The meditative Pomodoro timer offers the user three drop-down menus, one to choose the length of the study interval and its associated break time, one that specifies how many sessions they would like to complete in one sitting, and one that allows the user to decide what kind of prompts they would like to receive during their break. The options for the study intervals are Demo (1 minute on & 30 seconds off, made for easier demonstration), 15 minutes on & 5 minutes off, 30 minutes on & 5 minutes off, 45 minutes on & 10 minutes off, and 1 hour on & 15 minutes off. The number of sessions allowed range from 1 to 3, so that the user is not tempted to over-work themselves. The types of prompts that are available are 'Self Care', 'Meditation', 'Journal Prompts', and 'Exercise'.

How we built it

We built the web application using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We also utilized bootstrap in our HTML file.

Challenges we ran into

Initially, we were planning to use Python and the Flask framework to build our website. However, none of us had any previous experience using Flask, therefore we ended up running into unforeseen issues that prevented us from displaying a timer on our website. Since this was an essential element for our web application and most of us had been previously exposed to JavaScript, we decided to switch to JavaScript for our backend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of finishing this project to the best of our abilities. Since we had to switch to a different backend language after starting, we were initially concerned that we would not be able to finish the backend. In addition, even though we did not end up using the Flask framework, we are proud of how much we were able to learn about it and implement before switching to JavaScript. We are also proud of learning more JavaScript during this process.

What we learned

We learned a lot about integration between the frontend and backend of a web application. More specifically, we learned about the Flask framework, something that none of us had previously known. We also learned more JavaScript during this process and how to use the branch functionality in GitHub, something that none of us had previously used.

What's next for Meditative Pomodoro

Going forward it is our goal to be able to prevent the user from going over the recommended rounds. It is also a goal to be able to shift the timers out for one another instead of having each timer side by side in order to run. Additionally, we would like to modify the frontend of the code so that the website is compatible with phones and tablets as well as computers.

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