Inspiration
Due to the Coronavirus Pandemic, most education across the world has transitioned to online learning. Due to this, many teachers are having trouble getting students to do homework and assignments. We asked our teachers for the biggest problems they had due to online learning and they came back to us with problems of accountability and motivation. Also, students are having a hard time finding motivation to do the work in the first place. Many of us have experienced this firsthand and we wanted a way to assist us in the coming school year. Our main goal was to help teachers keep students accountable, while giving students an incentive to finish tasks.
What it does
Accountability in social settings are what keeps us on track. The unspoken assurance of having teammates, even in isolation, is what we have garnered to help students stay motivated the most.
The main focus of this app is anti-procrastination. Procrastinay gives students the most entertaining of incentives to continue completing tasks, most importantly: homework, daily workouts, and projects such as completing projects such as this. Your schedule is visualized to give the user a daily outlook on what classes there are and a weekly outlook for long-term events. Procrastinay has actual role playing elements, where different classes allow for different styles of learning: Paladins may work in long bursts, etc.. Groups of users, namely “Guilds” are divided into two types, where one is an official group for a specific course in a university, and the other is freely created and shared between groups whether course-related or not.
How we built it
Initially we spent a couple days finalizing our idea and deciding how we would go about creating it. We split into 2 teams to make coding easier and make sure everyone worked to their strengths. The backend is built with Python and django using the built in sqlite database. There are models for each feature of the app, including the users, tasks, and guilds. We utilized django to make an API that the frontend could hit to get information about the users or to create a new user or a task. We created an authorization system based off of tokens to allow users to login to their own accounts.
For the frontend, we created a mobile app using Flutter and Dart. The pages were all made in Flutter and were planned out on Figma. To get the information in the frontend, the application makes calls to our API and retrieves the information.
Challenges we ran into
One non technical issue that we had was that we had members of our team who lived in multiple time zones, including India and Taiwan. This made it difficult to find a time for us to meet up and work on it all together. We encountered numerous technical issues as well. Many of us had brand new skills to be introduced to such as learning how to use Flutter and Dart, and some of us faced complications due to non-up-to-date hardware.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Inventing a new innovative way to engage students in times of the pandemic students could actively work with. Learning new languages and working with new people.
What we learned
While each of us had some strengths and languages we already knew, we all went out of our comfort zones and tried to learn new things. People who didn’t know django learnt django, and people who had never done mobile development got acquainted with it.
What's next for Procrastinay
While we didn’t have enough time to complete our project, to take it to the next level we would have many public guilds that users would be able to join and collaborate on tasks. For example, people would be able to join a college class that they are in and then do the tasks with that group.
Another major goal we had was to have a very detailed incentive program to complete tasks, including cosmetics for the user’s characters, and pets that you could acquire by completing tasks.
We would strive to achieve a cleaner and more attractive User Interface system. Another feature we considered including was the “infinite whiteboard” system where users could write tips and tricks to share with others. The profile page, visible by others, could enable the users to link their academic and social accounts such as Linkedin and Twitter for direct consultation, messaging, or feedback.
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