ZenGarden

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  The ZenGarden team

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  The ZenGarden home screen

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  The main sand screen

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  The drawing feature of the app in use

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  The drag and drop feature with the drawing so you can customize your garden

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  The share feature to share your zen

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  The settings screen to play one of two calming and relaxing songs

Inspiration

Our freshman history teacher, Mr. Simmons, had a small zen garden in his room that he would let us use when we were stressed out. The garden he had helped us calm down and realize that we would be okay. We wanted to be able to recreate that same concept into an app so you can always have it with you.

Our Solution

ZenGarden was designed to solve a common problem among today's students; stress and anxiety. Our app gives people the chance to take a break from their daily stress and spend a few minutes in zen. It gives users an enjoyable experience while they listen to calming music and design their own zen garden that they can then share with friends if they choose.

What it does

ZenGarden is exactly what it sounds like, a virtual zen garden. Our app, however, has features that are unique to ZenGarden. We have a drag and drop system that has seasonal images that you can use to customize your garden. The app is currently displaying fall. We also have music that can be turned on to play in the background of the app as you draw in the sand. Once you're happy with your garden, then you can use the share function to share your zen.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was finding a way to draw in the sand directly. We tried a few different methods, including using a grid system that had smaller images and when you dragged, the image would change, but we ultimately had to go in a different direction. We also struggled with keeping the sprites from colliding, we found minor fixes to that and are still in the process of solving this issue.

What we learned

We learned how to use MIT App Inventor. The format of MIT App Inventor was very user-friendly and easy for our team to pick up. We also learned how to work in a team. It was much simpler to break up the major components of our app into smaller tasks and delegate to each member of the team. This is a valuable skill to have when pursing a career in technology and being a part of this challenge taught us just how important it is.

What's next for ZenGarden

In the next version of the app we would enhance the user experience. We want to make it a three-dimensional interface and also add a rake to use in the sand. We hope to initialize music in the home screen of the app as well. We would also have the app synchronized to a calendar so it would manually change seasonal themes.

Built With

• mit-app-inventor