Tab Timer

Tab Timer - personalized pathway to productivity and success

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Inspiration

This is our first hackathon ever, and it has been a great team-building group coding experience where we gained a lot of knowledge for our next hackathon! Additionally, our mission, as a group of girls in STEM, is to increase representation and gender equality in STEM-based careers, starting from a young age. Our inspiration for this app was that, as 9th graders, we realized how tough the transition between middle and high school can truly be. Time management is a crucial skill for busy students who need to do schoolwork, prepare for exams, participate in extracurriculars, and much more; but, often, high schoolers have a tendency to waste time and spend a lot of their time on social media and entertainment apps. We ourselves had trouble maintaining proper time management skills over quarantine and now coming back from virtual to in-person school, even though our workload as high schoolers has infinitely increased, we are still tempted to take many breaks and waste time instead of work. As a result of this, we do not get much sleep and have trouble paying attention in class the next day; to counter this, Tab Timer helps us stay on task and increase productivity, which is especially critical for high school or college students who have a lot on their hands that they need to manage.

What it does

Students nowadays struggle on finishing their work on time and completing tasks without getting distracted. Because of society's reliance on the internet, many teenagers are always found using social media, distracting them from doing schoolwork, practicing for their extracurriculars, and many more of their duties. That's where Tab Timer comes in! Our browser extension reminds users to stay on task by setting a timer on websites to make sure they are productive in the limited time that they set, and they can get their job done in order to enjoy activities aside from work.

How we built it

Going into the process of coding our Tab Timer chrome extension, some of us had more experience in coding languages than others. We all knew Java and Python, but we got exposed to new language syntaxes such as Javascript, HTML, and CSS. We learned how to intertwine these languages and make them work together, and we also learned that we needed the patience to be able to create a successful program.

Challenges we ran into

Error checking was a long process for us, as we encountered multiple struggles during our coding. First of all, creating a Chrome Extension has security issues for the extension with certain syntaxes, and so we were not able to use any inline scripting such as onclick in our program. This was an important revelation because we had to recode a section of our timer code to no longer use onclick to toggle the timer to turn on, and we had to come up with inventive ways to go about the same procedure. Additionally, the timer code itself had issues in compatibility; originally, it was in Python, but we had to recode it to be in Javascript so that it could work better with our HTML code. Additionally, we had struggles with the timer showing up itself, and we had to do a lot of research on multiple different websites throughout in order to get our code working the way we wanted it to.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are so happy that we were able to get this coding experience and we hope to participate in GunnHacks next year!

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