Inspiration
Many people have great ideas that strike randomly. Ideas for novels might unfold in a dream. A passing comment on the subway might inspire a new crochet project. Or a YouTube video might propel someone to complete a course on the stock exchange.
Either way, often we have many ideas to pursue to shape a better future for ourselves, or for the world as a whole. However, for projects to come into fruition, we need accountability. Without it, our ideas remain great ideas, but not the reality. Our productivity webapp aims to target this issue, spurring individuals to finish their projects.
What it does
TortoiseWorks encourages slow and steady progress on projects that are chosen by the user. It is versatile, allowing users to name the project and a quantifiable unit (pages in a book, words in a dissertation, videos in a course) and an end date goal.
How we built it
We started with simple website HTML design to start a home page with buttons for navigation going across the top page. Then, we made routes to different subpages, still using the basic HTML layout. We started with the Projects Page, where users are allowed to log their progress on a graph. They are able to input their work in quantifiable units depending on the project and log their progress, which updates on a live dynamic graph.
Challenges we ran into
One of the challenges we ran into was learning how to save the user-inputted data on the graph, so that when the page is updated, the previous data remains on the page. Another challenge was learning how to make the live graph dynamically update. We had to consult many online sources for the methods that might be used for this dynamic graph.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
As two-thirds of our team are beginner coders who haven’t taken APCS, getting this far and building even the start of a web application was an accomplishment for us. Coding-wise, the dynamically moving graph was the most impressive and difficult part of our project, and it took up the majority of the time we spent coding.
What's next for TortoiseWorks
As we continue to learn the field of computer science, we hope to improve the design and add functions to the website. While we’re proud of what we have so far, we plan to continue adding applications to make it more appealing to users. Furthermore, TortoiseWorks was intended to be a social site, where progress updates can be shared with others, allowing followers to celebrate landmarks and hold each other accountable for finishing the project. Lastly, we seek to add a daily goal for the user and allows the user to log their progress, comparing it to the speed at which is expected to meet the project end date.
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