MyPandaPal

Introducing an innovative gamified habit tracker that allows you to keep track of all of your healthy habits while taking care of your digital pet: Panda Pal!

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As busy university students trying to balance the stress of attending back-to-back classes, keeping up with coursework, attending a lot of meetings, and juggling a whole lot of extracurriculars, it can be easy to forget about maintaining healthy habits. We often forget to properly sit down to eat a meal, drink water, exercise regularly, and sleep enough hours. We've all been there and have had classes starting at 8 am in the morning and meetings ending at 9 pm at night, resulting in us completely losing track of healthy habits!

We built MyPandaPal to solve exactly this issue faced by burnt-out students! It's an interactive Chrome Extension that features real-time notifications alerting the user to take the appropriate action when it's time to eat/drink/sleep/exercise to ultimately regulate healthy habits. Every user would have their own Pet Panda to take care of, which represents themselves and the Panda displays a different mood based on the personalized status of healthy habit tracking. Users can press the appropriate button for whichever action they just performed (e.g. eating or drinking) and this would update the mood of the Panda accordingly. Your goal is to keep your Panda happy by regularly tracking your healthy habits. Habit stats (hunger/thirst/energy/happiness) would be displayed directly on the webpage (e.g. hunger level of 50%) so that every user would be able to keep track of their own personalized progress. The Panda is capable of displaying emotion of happiness, neutrality, sadness, and death. Therefore, if the Panda goes too long without one of the four healthy habits, the appropriate notification reminders would pop up on the user's screen, and on the extreme end, the Panda would die—something we all do not want to see! Remember, your Pet Panda represents yourself: MyPandaPal is a gamified habit tracker/habit regulation tool that motivates users to take care of their pets and in turn, take care of themselves to prevent burnout and practice a healthier lifestyle.

Through building our project, we’ve learned to be patient throughout the process and take breaks for ourselves when needed. We are proud to say we didn’t pull any all-nighters despite feeling quite stressed throughout the day!

To build it, we used HTML, CSS, Javascript, JSON and implemented it as a Chrome Extension. We designed the interface to provide the best user-friendly and creative experience for the user!

Some challenges we’ve faced include finding ways of tracking previous data, implementing it as a Chrome Extension, learning how to use keyframes in CSS, finding a proper way to alert users to drink water, and making everything user-friendly and visually appealing.

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