Inspiration
Learning at home is not the same as learning at school! Remote learning comes with its own host of mental health and productivity problems. While at school, your headspace just right for productivity since everyone around you is doing the same. At home, that’s a different story. Everyone’s home environment varies, and some can be full of distractions. Additionally, being physically separated from people for so long can bring a host of mental health challenges. What is the best way we can recreate a productive and healthy environment at home, by transforming one’s headspace?
What it does
StudyZen plays subject-specific music on demand to help aid one's study session and ability, and gives regular mental health checkins to monitor each student’s headspace. The user can add classes by giving them a name and selecting a subject, then the optimal music type will be automatically assigned. The student fan then play, pause, and seek the music using the media player. Once they end their study session, they will be given a mental health survey to assess their headspace. If any response is concerning, the student is reaction to mental health resources. Additionally, each response to the “On a scale of 1-10, how is your mental health today?”is tracked in a dynamically updated graph so the student can see the trend of their mental health over time.
How we built it
StudyZen is a front end web application built using React with Nodejs. For demo purposes, user data is not saved in a backend but is stored locally. In the future, Expressjs with a MongoDB database would be used for a fully functioning backend. The adaptive media player in the app is build around the react-player package with custom ui controls added. The media player uses YouTube links/playlists specifically selected to match each subject. The mental health over time graph is updated with each survey submission at the end of a study session and uses the react-vis package to visualize the data.
Challenges we ran into
One of our biggest hurdles was during the brainstorming stage, where we couldn't decide on what to do! We would think of a crazy idea and then realize it was not the best, and so it took us an insane amount of time to finalize our idea. Moreover, we misjudged how long it would take to complete certain aspects of the project, so time management is something to be improved.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of how we efficiently got work done. We spent a lot of time just thinking, but were able to actually create the program and draft our business model in less than two days. We were very proud and satisfied with ourselves with our end product, because it made us love our startup even more.
What we learned
From splitting into a business and development team, then meeting at the end of the day to film our pitch, we learned how to divide and conquer then work together at the end. Not much went wrong, but we believe that for next time, we need to manage our time better and split the tasks into more equal parts. This will ensure that nobody is burning themselves out because something is harder to complete than they initially thought.
What's next for StudyZen
We have worked extremely hard on this idea, and believe that it has potential for a startup! If our idea and business plan are received well in this competition, we will continue developing StudyZen (add a backend, more features, tweak the business plan) until it is production ready. Then we will get ready to help students everywhere through these challenging times by transforming their headspace into a healthy and productive one wherever they are!
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