StudyNook

Users can choose their preferred character and background for the study room
The study room main features are the pomodoro timer, to do list and chat messaging all in real time
Users can create a public or private room
Displays rooms
A3 poster of StudyNook!
Landing Page to get started
Register Page
Log in Page
Real time messaging with other users in the same study room

Inspiration

It started as a simple project aimed to upskill the trainees in the group. However, the team was determined in building a worthwhile project that we were proud of. The consistent discussions and meetups encouraged throughout the term encouraged exciting ideas on how we could build a productive study application that was different from the rest. The idea is simple, but we had genuine fun and it has shown through our project!

What it does

Studynook is a social study platform built around a game pixel aesthetic which promotes productivity and light social interaction. Users can set and customise their room's study topic, and engage with multiple users through visual avatars shown as characters walking in the study room. Each room contains a pomodoro, task list, and a chat to maintain user engagement. These features are all real time as any user in the study room can see what changes other users have done.

How we built it

Since this was a training program project, we used react with Next.js for the frontend and Tailwind CSS for the styling. For the backend such as authentication, database and real-time features, we used Supabase.

Challenges we ran into

As most of us in the group were trainees, it was our first time building a whole project from start to end and certainly faced a lot of challenges related to having never proper experience before. One example was implementing features to be real time using sockets and communicating and updating it properly through our database.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We first and foremost proud of the application being usable and even deployed for everyone to try. It has been rewarding to see our friends use and interact with the application in fun ways. Also, the idea of a study application being elevated with our unique yet clean aesthetic of 2D pixel game art has been fulfilling since we maintain both functionality and personality.

What we learned

Building an application to then deploying it has brought us a deeper level of collaborative software development and full stack development.

What's next for StudyNook

We certainly plan for more features that make StudyNook more exciting to use! At the beginning of the project, we planned to gamify the app through having in-game currency to reward users for the more study sessions they do. The game currency would be used to allow the users to get access to more avatars and backgrounds for their study rooms. Furthermore, we would like to implement an analytics page of how long the user the studied for and how frequently. This would be useful for the user if they wanted to analyse their study patterns. We also plan for aesthetic features such as a night mode and more game assets. As for security, we should definitely work on making StudyNook safer to use since we have not been thorough with testing.