Sched-oosh

Live dashboard displaying event data
Create a group for leaderboards between your friends.

Sched-oosh is a social accountability app that helps students actually show up to class by combining calendar imports, location-based check-ins, and friendly competition with friends. It automatically detects your lectures, verifies you’re really there using your location when they happen, and updates a live leaderboard!

Going into this Hackathon, we initially wanted to make an app that would lock users' phones while they were in lectures, but found it to be too unoriginal and inconvenient for the user. So, we looked for a friendlier approach that relied on social reinforcement rather than technological. We brainstormed and came up with the idea to have users check in to their lectures, and to allow them to compete or collaborate with classmates and friends by tracking how many classes they miss. They can create groups with other users to compare how diligent they are. Furthermore, to prevent a user from faking their attendance, they must be within a designated radius of the class building when they go to check in. This was accomplished with Apple Calendar, so users can easily upload their timetables onto the app.

Since we knew our product would work best as an iOS app, we decided to attend the Swift Playground workshop to help us understand the language, since none of us had prior experience with it. We then began work on the frontend, adding the basic functionality and familiarizing ourselves with the IDE. One of our main goals was to incorporate Flask for the backend. We used SQLAlchemy to create a database system to store all of our users' data, with tables for user data, scores, groups, and classes. Then, we structured the routes so it was easy for Swift to make calls to the backend to "get" and "post" data.

One of the biggest challenges we faced was getting the API to and from Swift. We had issues debugging since we were so unfamiliar with the language, and nearly abandoned the backend entirely, but we stayed patient and eventually got it running. Getting it to work and having a proper login system that stores users' accounts was our proudest accomplishment of the project. Alongside that, we were very pleased with how appealing our UI turned out to be. The colour scheme looks more professional than anything we've created before, partially due to the ease of use of Swift Playground.

Our biggest takeaway from the project was how user-friendly Swift was for new developers. Many of the features felt very intuitive, and the Swift Playground features saved a lot of time with their versatility. Since the Flask backend was built to be scaled, we could look towards expanding the scope of Sched-oosh to be global as opposed to a locally hosted app. This would allow universities, businesses, etc., to access the product.