zenith

Inspiration

This project was inspired by personal experiences - from laying in bed for hours on our phones before sleeping, to scrolling endlessly in hopes of coloring a world that becomes increasingly desaturated with every reel and piece of content that we consume.

College students are all-too-familiar with how phones have taken over our lives. In our personal lives, we found ourselves scrolling to saturate a world that lost color with every reel, post, and piece of content - a never-ending negative feedback loop. Current solutions involve forcefully blocking apps, or even hardware that can lock phones away, and though they may be effective for short periods, we have found (through experience) that most of these methods can be bypassed with a bit of effort. What if there was a more organic way to reduce screen time? This train of thought paved the way for a natural way to reduce screen time - through competition.

What it does

Our app allows users to enter their screen times daily, to which our ranking system sorts the player into a rank during a placement period (3 days). At a glance, this rank is a reflection of the player's screen time habits and potential progress. The player can then rank up or rank down depending on the amount of screen time reduction (or inflation) and streaks of progress. Players then compete for the top position on the leaderboard, which displays everyone's elo and ranks.

How we built it

We built the app using React Native and Firebase, and designed it using Figma.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a large blocker which was us trying to incorporate Google authentication with React Native. We have had some previous experience doing so for NextJS. We thought it'd be simpler to do Google authentication here than a normal sign in, but we ended up losing a large chunk of time due to this issue. We ended up pivoting to normal email sign in, and we were able to proceed with a new plan to accommodate for lost time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're definitely proud that we put together a fully working demo that could be used tomorrow by players. While it is definitely more of a proof-of-concept, we're proud of the level of polish we were able to achieve.

What we learned

Despite trying to consider the small scope of a project which should be completed in 24 hours, we learned that it might be beneficial to exaggerate this fact even further.

What's next for zenith

The most obvious point of improvement would be to use Apple's ScreenTime API. This requires an Apple Developer account, so it was not possible to do this during the allotted time. Additionally, we would like to add a party feature which allows for direct challenges between players.

Built With

• figma
• firebase
• react-native