Stay At Home

Help contain Covid-19 by 'Staying At Home' and growing your virtual garden! This app will grow your own virtual succulent garden if you spend over 20 hours a day at home.

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What track we're submitting to

We are submitting to the Health track.

Inspiration

With the current spike in COVID-19 cases and what experts are telling the public, it is evident that we need to stay at home as much as possible. Therefore, we decided to create an app that would motivate people to do the right thing and stay at home to help decrease the spread of COVID-19. A current popular app that inspired us in the design of our app was "Forest", which encourages people to decrease the time spent on their phone in much the same way as we envisioned. We were inspired to adapt this concept - but with a focus on limiting leaving the house rather than limiting time spent on your phone.

What it does

"Stay at Home" tracks the amount of time users spends at their house through the usage of location services, and grows a virtual succulent while they are at home. The more time a user spends at home, the more the plant grows. If a user is at home for more than 20 hours in a day, the plant fully grows and is added to their monthly garden. Therefore, users are rewarded with a beautiful virtual garden when the spend more time at home - helping to flatten the curve of COVID-19.

How we built it

We used Android Studio to create our app. Specifically, we used Java for backend development and XML + Android Studio Design tools for the front-end. We also used the Maps SDK for Android API to provide an improved front end display for the location of the user.

Challenges we ran into

This hackathon was a great opportunity to grow. It was both of our first experiences with mobile app development and Android Development Studio. This meant that there was a learning curve for us. This was also our first experience using Google Cloud Developer tools for our project, (and this was an opportunity for Cynthia to grow with Java). I think we took on a big challenge, but since we both wanted to "finally build a mobile app", it was a great experience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As mentioned above, it was really rewarding to see the final product that we created to be our first mobile app! Another accomplishment that we were proud of was getting the location tracking part of the app to work - getting the Google Maps front end to finally display was another win.

What we learned

We learned a lot about Android app development through working on "Stay at Home". As mentioned above, this was the first time either of us have created a mobile app and it was a great experience. I (Quentin) already have a good amount of experience with Java, and it was really nice to be able to translate my experience into such a user-friendly product. I (Cynthia) was really happy to figure out my bugs with getting locations and displaying locations.

What's next for Stay At Home

Our biggest task will be to link together all of the different pages and make sure everything works together. Unfortunately, we just did not have enough time to combine everything in a way that worked coherently with all the functionality we envisioned and worked on. This is something we look forward to tackling together. Also, we would like to make adjustments to the design to make our app a little more pretty and polished in comparison to our first draft that we have finished here.

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