Study Gator

Track study time, earn points, and compete on a UF-wide and friend based leaderboard system! See when friends are in the library and stay motivated. Study smarter, not harder!

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Education

Inspiration

80-95% of college students procrastinate. Oftentimes, students feel burned out with their coursework and lack the motivation to study. As college students ourselves, we unfortunately have had our fair share of these sentiments and came up with Study Gator as a remedy to make studying more enjoyable. Research has shown that gamification, such as participating in friendly competition with your peers, is effective at enhancing engagement, and we decided to apply such principles in our project to benefit the UF student body and education overall.

What it does

Study Gator is organized into four key tabs, the Home tab, where users can start and stop their study sessions, the Friends tab, where users can see their friends and whether or not they are in a library or not and if so which library on campus they are in, the Profile tab, where users can view their overall study stats, and the Leaderboard tab, which displays both the user's friends' rankings and the global leaderboard for added competition.

How we built it

We used the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express, React Native, and Node.js) in conjunction with Expo Go to develop our mobile app.

Challenges we ran into

Developing Study Gator came with several challenges throughout the time of this hackathon. We faced difficulties in designing an intuitive user interface that incorporated study tracking, friend interactions, and gamification elements without overwhelming users. Another challenge was managing data efficiently, especially when handling study session logs, user location, and leaderboard updates in real time. Integrating authentication and the friends features in a way that felt smooth and engaging required careful planning. Despite these obstacles, we persevered and ended up developing an app that we were all very proud of and wanted to continue developing and updating in the future.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team is composed of freshmen, and this is one of our team members' first hackathons, so we are proud to have successfully worked together to create a final, cohesive, working product. We accomplished the vast majority of what we had planned and are fully satisfied with our mobile app that we could see using ourselves.

What we learned

For two of our team members, this project was their first foray into development with MongoDB, React Native, and Expo Go. More generally, however, this project helped us learn how to work in a team and break up larger tasks in order to successfully create a working final product.

What's next for Study Gator

For the future of Study Gator, we want to enhance the user experience by expanding gamification with study challenges, rewards, and streak tracking to keep users motivated. We also plan to improve the location based features by enabling users to form study groups based on location proximity, making collaboration easier. Fostering a community through shared study tips, study sessions, and forums are also ways we planned on enhancing engagement. Finally, gathering user feedback will ultimately guide our improvements, ensuring the app evolves to best meet the needs of students.

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