Inspiration
According to the National Institute on Mental Illness (NAMI), 64% of teens reported feeling the world is more stressful now than when their parents were their age. As engineering students, we can relate. We know how stressful and tiresome trying to keep track of everything is. As students try to navigate through the challenges of adulthood, and time management in their busy schedules, they tend to feel sad and unmotivated. Due to all the changes, there is a longing for the nostalgic comfort of their childhood shows, songs, and games. Keeping this all in mind, we wanted to create a to-do list that can help students be more productive in a way that is good for their mental health.
We identified 3 main shortcomings in common to-do list apps:
- They are separate apps or windows you need to open which makes it difficult to put and remove tasks fast and efficiently.
- They are very plain and basic with the overall aesthetic.
- They don't have a reminder feature.
What it does
To solve these problems, we created a Chrome extension that makes organization and time management fun. Our program allows students to input their tasks quickly and easily with a single click on their browser. This is very helpful as course websites, videos and assignments are all accessed through the browser so it's very convenient to have a small popup to-do list accessible from any window. We also transformed the dreadful task of checking your to-do list into a fun experience. We added gifs that change every time you click on the extension to motivate and excite users into using their to-do lists. Additionally, we used a brown simplistic colour theme and handwriting-like fonts that give a sense of vintage paper and traditional memo pad notes. Most importantly, the feature that truly makes this a must-have for every student is the reminders. Often, we get caught up sending emails, watching Netflix, or doing other tasks causing us to forget deadlines and fall behind. Our reminder feature allows users to set the time they want to be reminded and gives fun pop-up alerts so you will no longer miss deadlines.
How we built it
Employing a blend of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, we ventured into the realm of Chrome extension development for the first time. Despite the initial learning curve, we're thrilled with the outcome! Our to-do list stands out for its charming incorporation of beloved childhood cartoon characters and dynamic background colours that transform with each interaction.
Challenges we ran into
We started our project by talking to mentors, researching, and setting up the relevant React.js code. We faced challenges with the program setup, installing the relevant packages and understanding the process of creating a Chrome extension. However, a few hours in, we hit our first milestone of getting a basic "hello world" extension to pop up. Our second task was integrating the to-do list logic into the existing files of our extension. We faced issues as some of our files were incompatible and after a lot of debugging, we decided that we should take another approach to make our project. As a result, we decided to implement our Chrome extension program using HTML, CSS and JavaScript allowing us more flexibility.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of successfully crafting a functional to-do list Chrome extension that seamlessly captures the essence of nostalgia. Despite encountering obstacles along the way, we remained resilient and managed to deliver our project within the allotted time frame.
What we learned
First and foremost, we learned that we need to start with something simpler like a react website before trying to get a functional to-do list and an extension as well. With the support of our amazing mentors, we learned how to use GitHub more efficiently and we explored the design process bringing a fun idea we came up with into a final product.
What's next for MemoryLaneMemo
MemoryLane Memo has a lot of potential with its nostalgic and user-focused design!
- We want to add an AI chatbot so you can ask for recommendations and advice straight from the pop-up.
- We also want to integrate it with Google Calendar so that your tasks can be scheduled and time-blocked more easily.
- We want to add a gif API for more variety in the gifs.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.