Study Focus: Mindfulness App for 10min block study session

UI of the app. Distraction free for a focused work session

For tryouts use the link on an iPhone browser and download the app Go to Settings>General>Device Management and press Trust Thunkable, Inc Then Head to the app (beaver symbol) and have fun (i.e focus more on work)

Inspiration

Being an Oxford student getting the absolute maximum amount of work done in the least amount of time has been incredibly crucial. So I wanted to find out effective ways of studying and stumbled upon people who use mindfulness music and short burst study sessions to achieve this. So for my Oxford Hack Project I wanted to prototype a mobile app which will plays a selection of mindfulness music each 10 minutes without the distractions baked into other streaming services.

What it does

So when a student wants to study they can select a mindfulness music which would play for 10 mins. Within that time, the music will help increase their focus. Therefore, they must aim to finish a block of their work within 10 mins. After, 10 mins of work they can have a break of 5mins, to relax, after which they repeat this until all their work is done. Each study session must be initiated by clicking on the music one would like to play. As my app doesn't have the ads and other distractions which are baked into other streaming services such as Spotify or Youtube music, it would not lead students to procrastinate while studying.

How we built it

It was built on a platform called Thunkable which allowed me to prototype a working model of my programme during the given timeframe

Challenges we ran into

The live programme testing on the platform, was buggy as it did not update properly as the code was refined each time. We overcame it by doing changes in incremental blocks and exporting it as a Web App for testing purposes.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud that we were able to prototype a working iOS app in just one day. What we are most proud of is that we were able to give the app a jazzy student aesthetic.

What we learned

We learnt so much about how humans focus, including the psychology behind it and especially how focus can be improved. We learnt and discovered platforms which allow for rapid prototyping. We learnt how to work under strict time constraints to come up with a solution to a problem.

What's next for Study Focus: Mindfulness App for 10min block study session

We would love to developed this prototype into a full fledged ad polished app. Our Milestones towards that would be:
Broaden the range of mindfulness music on offer.
Record in house music at Oxford using mindfulness principles. Improve the UI/UX for the app. Enable push notifications to remind users to work. Integration with Apple Health Work and Mindfulness tracking Broaden the range of mindfulness music on offer.
Allow, external users to submit music which is vetted and released on the app.