Are We Studying

Honestly, we're getting tired of casual study sessions with friends, so we're here to introduce ranked study! A new and innovative way to compete with your friends through friendly study competition!

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Inspiration

Something we've noticed about our university classmates is that a lot of us struggle with internal motivations to study. In our experience, study sessions have often had more extrinsic and external motivators, be it upcoming deadlines, or exam panic. From this struggle we've risen a solution: Are We Studying, an app that doubles both as a phone distraction negator (effectively forces your phone to be inactive) and a ranking system for you and your friends!

What it does

Are We Studying is a phone app that locks your phone during study sessions and keeps track of how long you study for a given time. It does this by opening a stopwatch that will get interrupted as soon as you get distracted by opening notifcations on your phone, doomscrolling on TikTok or anything that isn't the main app.

This stopwatch is your main ranking currency in the game. Where the higher your study hours, the higher your overall ranking in the game.

The app also allows private and public lobbies which can also be attributed to any Monash unit, if you would ever like to host a private lobby to compete privately with your friends on some assignments or study.

How we built it

It was built using React Native, using Supabase as a database and Expo to run it on your phone.

Challenges we ran into

Most of our team were unfamiliar with using React, Supabasae and Expo, and it was up to us as a team to teach each other the language and how it works. Additionally, one of our teammates was unavailable for most of the day for work, and as such was unable to participate as much as other teams and the rest of the team members.

Despite this, we all pushed forward and did our best to provide a service that matches our concept and a functional app that works exactly as intended.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For the timeframe and the unfamiliarity with the code base, we are incredibly proud of the product we were able to release. Despite spending a large chunk of time familiarizing ourselves with the language, code and API integrations, we were still able to make the most of our time developing the product, and consequently through our hard work and efforts, were able to develop a product which has the base functionality we intended.

What we learned

We learned a lot during this endeavor, the most obvious being familiarity with React Native, Supabase and Expo, but we also learnt a lot about teamwork, about being an active team member and a lot about how individual strengths can lead to incredible team strength. We also had a massive reality check regarding time management due to the short timeframe.

What's next for Are We Studying

There's a lot of functionality that we opted not to include for this Hackathon due to time constraints, such as task management, a leaderboard system, minigames, etc.

We also wanted to release an app that not only works incredibly well and optimised, but we want something that is aesthetic to work

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