StepItUp

Inspiration

Over the past few months, we have been faced with a worldwide pandemic that no one could ever see coming. As a result, our day to day lives have been altered drastically. Whether it be being under lockdown, taking a prolonged break from work, or being home from school, staying active has been a common problem we have seen people encountering.

What it does

Hoping to reverse this slump we have recently found ourselves engaged in, seemingly unable to crawl out of it, we have created an app called StepItUp, which is primarily focused on motivating users to get up and walking by competing with fellow friends to see who can walk the most at the end of each week. Coins are earned for each step users walk which can later be used to purchase items to design their own personalized avatars, ultimately providing a fun and competitive experience to encourage users during this pandemic to remain healthy and active.

How we built it

We used Amazon Web Services to manage our back end resources. Using the EC2 cloud compute service that they offer to host an instance of our REST API server that we coded in Python in tandem with the provided Relational Database Service to host our MySQL database. On the front end, we used Apple’s Xcode to code our UI design in Swift, using a blend of Storyboard and Programmatic implementation for the visual layout, and a series of web requests for the frontend-backend connection.

Challenges we ran into

We had many challenges working on our MySQL database because we weren't familiar with back end resources. This was also our first time creating a fully-functioning app, making it difficult to figure out what we could realistically put out.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We are proud of being able to learn how to code in Swift, but also how to connect the front end and back end with each other. We are glad that we were able to design and create an app that can keep us connected during quarantine.

What we learned

We learned how to split tasks and how to work together on certain things that needed more research and YouTube tutorial watching.

What's next for StepItUp

We want to continue polishing this app so that we can publish it on the App Store. We hope that this app will inspire people to stay in touch with friends and to take daily walks.

Built With

• amazon-web-services
• healthkit
• mysql
• swift
• xcode