Piggy Points: Screen Time Manager App

Home page of our app where we give information about us and why we created this app
Goals that you can complete for points.
Ideas for activities that we recommend
Here is where you can see how many points you have in your "piggy bank"
A graph display your daily screen time on selected social media
A variety of gift cards you can redeem with your points

Inspiration

When we first heard of this competition, we wanted to invent a product that’s useful to us. As adolescents, we know how difficult it can be to restrain ourselves from endlessly scrolling through meaningless posts on social media instead of devoting our time to assignments that we procrastinated on. Additionally, we researched social media addiction previously for a research paper and were shocked at how much harm it can cause to our mental health and well-being, which made us passionate about coming up with creative ways to tackle the major issue that is behavioural addiction, with a main focus on social media addiction. We brainstormed several ideas that aim to break social media addiction and we wanted to come up with a solution that's long-lasting. At last, we decided on the idea of creating an app that pays users to reduce the amount of time they spend on social media each day because we feel that users are more motivated if we offer a monetary reward for completing simple tasks that require them to put down their phones. Over time, they will develop healthy habits such as going on a walk and associate these healthy habits with monetary rewards they can redeem.

What it does

Piggy Points: Screen Time Manager is an app that essentially motivates users to reduce their time spent on social media and encourages them to discover alternative forms of entertainment instead of scrolling through social media all day. Our app offers activities we recommend that users can attempt, goals that the users can complete in order to earn points, and gift cards that the users can redeem with the points stored in their “piggy bank”.

How we built it

Using Jotform, we created a prototype for what our app could look like. Our app consists of three main components: goals, activities, and rewards. For goals, we focused on making them realistic for people who have a busy lifestyle and might not be able to dedicate too much time to the goals in this app. For activities, we researched and added links to helpful articles that list a wide range of activities the users can play around with. For rewards, we considered both youths and adults and made sure everyone has a reward that keeps them motivated to complete the goals for points.

Challenges we ran into

The challenge we struggled the longest on was finding an application that we could use to create our app. We couldn't pay for any applications and many of the free ones that we found had limited features, which made it so that we couldn't design our app to the full extent of the features we wanted it to include. Even after finding Jotform, the platform we used to create our app, we struggled to find features that aligned with what we had in mind, which is why some of the features on our app do not function according to what we expected.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The biggest accomplishment that we're most proud of is our ability to quickly and effectively come up with a solution to an issue that is relevant to us and our peers in a timely manner. Social media addiction is a major issue, especially in our generation. It's a difficult topic but we're proud of the unique solution that we came up with.

What we learned

Through this project, we learned how to design an app and make good use of our time. At first, we felt confused and didn't know what we wanted to start with, but we worked collaboratively and assigned each group member different tasks. Although we were unfamiliar with designing an app and coming up with a pitch video, we were able to persevere and successfully finish our project.

What's next for Piggy Points: Screen Time Manager App

Our next step for Piggy Points: Screen Time Manager App is to get monetized by partnering with brands and getting sponsors so that we may add as many features as we want to ensure people have the easiest tool to overcome social media addiction. With more sponsorships, we can provide more strategies and techniques to users that will allow them to discover a new side of themselves and earn more monetary rewards while making an effort to reduce their social media usage.