Focusly | Devpost

Inspiration 💡

More than 10% of students worldwide have a hard time focusing while reading especially long texts, and after the pandemic, it has been getting worse. Reading difficulties impact students' development during their whole lives, but many don't recognize or know that they suffer from them. Furthermore, the loss of interest in school and studying can even reach the point of hatred from students, making them have no motivation or accumulate stress and anxiety from studying even though they don't like it.

In 2019, The Guardian reported that “the information age has changed the general attention span. A recently published study from researchers at the Technical University of Denmark suggests the collective global attention span is narrowing due to the amount of information that is presented to the public.” It said the findings, published in Nature Communications, indicate “people now have more things to focus on — but often focus on things for short periods of time.”

This is a problem that affects us, the developers, too. This is why we created Focusly, to bring back the joy of studying.

What it does 🤔

Focusly lets you:

Create a personalized account depending on your reading preferences (bionic reading) and topics of interest (football)
Generate notes of a topic you need to learn (e.x the mitochondria) taking into account reading preferences
Relate the topic you need to learn to the topics of your interest! (e.x how the mitochondria can relate to playing football)

Targeted Track : Education

How we built it ⚙️

Front-end

UI framework tailwindcss
React.js
Javascript
JQuery

APIs

printThis: https://github.com/jasonday/printThis
Google Fonts: https://fonts.google.com/
Chat GPT: https://openai.com/
Login (made by us): https://github.com/notaroomba/focusly

Back-end

Mongo DB
Express
Node.js

Design 🎨

We used our hands and hard paper to design a minimalistic Apple-y UI.

Challenges we ran into 😤

We ran over several problems while trying to use React and connect the APIs.

@awangran: just learned React a day ago and was in charge of the whole UI. Somehow it worked!
@notaroomba: thought the hackathon was a week-long Of course, time management is always a challenge but we somehow finished the main features

Accomplishments that we're proud of ✨

We are proud of our neat UI and well-built backend, and that we managed to build a tool to actually use during school! We hope other participants of the hack can use this app and hopefully help them study better.

What we learned 🙌

We gained knowledge in frontend development using HTML and CSS, as well as Javascript. We also learned about the issue of reading disabilities, and some solutions that could be implemented to help them. Also not to mention, we enhanced our googling and Stackoverflow searching skills during the hackathon :)

What's next for Focusly 🚀

One feature we plan to implement bionic reading as a reading preference for the user, as well as developing a learning area where you can be quizzed on your note sets. We also wanna implement functions we didn't have time to finish.