Study Helper

Inspiration

As high school students, our team is in an interesting phase where we are told we have to learn the skills that will be essential when we move on to further education but are not really given an idea about what those learning skills should be. We have watched our fellow students and even ourselves struggle especially when we should study and prepare ourselves for school. So many questions come up; How long should I study for? Should I take breaks? How long should those breaks be? These are only some of the questions that StudyHelper was designed to answer. For students of any age, our application offers an accessible route towards effective studying

What it does

StudyHelper is a desktop application that helps students manage their time during studying with the goal of finding a technique that both reduces the amount of burnout and maximizes efficiency. Users will find be able to select one of three study methods to use during their time with StudyHelper. The three are the pomodoro technique (25 minutes studying, 5 minutes break), the Desktime variation (57 minute studying, 12 minute break) and the Ultradian Rhythm (90 minute studying, 30 minute break). Each person has different preferences so these options will allow StudyHelper appeal to the widest audience as possible. The application also allows the user to set the total amount of time they wish to study for. Once the technique and the time are selected, the program will clearly display whether the person is in break or study period with visual indicators and how much time is left in each phase.

How we built it

StudyHelper was built with JFrames. This was a conscious decision as it is not only something our team was comfortable working with, but was assured to be able to run on nearly any machine or operating system. We tried to stay away from having internet dependent features as that would be antithetical to having a desktop application. The primary focus is on the user and all the data is preloaded into the application which allows this to be run offline.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we had was with making the user experience enjoyable. For a relatively simple application we didn't want to load with useless features, functional dead ends, and confusing interfaces. Quite a bit of time was spent in making the interface easy to understand and efficient. When someone is studying, the last thing they want to deal with is an unwieldy system that only makes their life more difficult. StudyHelper is primarily running in the background and not distracting the user from their more pressing activities. Overall, this obstacle was overcome through members that were dedicated to creating design elements and the overall layout of the application.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As a team, we are proud about how we pulled together to create this application. While It isn't by any means the most revolutionary or flashy project, it was a good display of the coding and design skills we’ve built in our high school years. More specifically, the simplicity of our interface is a highlight as in under 10 seconds someone can be fully set up for a study session that could help them excel in a course.

What we learned

The most impactful lesson from creating StudyHelper was not one that stemmed from the technical side of it but rather the organizational side. We all had disparate skills that as we progressed further began to clash with each other. As a group we began to make compromises based on who would do what and which direction the project would go. Our initial idea was very different from what StudyHelper is now. The team as a whole had to learn to adapt to the massive changes we made to our project. Studyhelper initially started off as a game written in Python using a certain library, then we switched to a different library, and finally we completely switched over to using Java. We all had to quickly learn to be flexible in our vision of our project and that is what we mostly took away from this whole process.

What's next for Study Helper

The next imaginable step for StudyHelper is to transition it from a desktop application to a web based one. While there are several benefits for having a standalone application, something on the web offers an unparalleled opportunity to make our project more convenient for the user. For a user to not have to download anything would make them far more willing to use our product and it would be more widely portable to different devices. Whether this comes in the form of a dedicated website or even just a chrome browser addon, a transition to the web would be overall beneficial. In terms of what is on the horizon for functionality, one can expect the ability to create their own tailor made study schedules and also the expansion of preset modes that appeal to a greater number of people.