#78 - CyberCrustacean's Push

Envisioning a world where kindness is a way of life.

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Inspiration

One small action can make a world of difference to the individuals and community around us. A member of our team experienced the weight of one's own actions first hand when one day, while waiting in line for food, he looked over and complimented the person behind him. Months later, that same person approached our teammate out of the blue. Barely recognizing this person he complimented that day, he was stunned by what they had to say. Although our teammate didn't realize it, that person was going through a struggle that none of us have ever experienced and going through such a crucial moment in their life conflicted on what to do next. Our teammate found out that person had been feeling, at that moment before he was complimented, as though nobody cared for them. Although small, and although our teammate barely remembered the action itself, it had made such a deeply profound impact on this strangers life. The power of a single kind act, and the positive effect it can have on the world, is the driving idea behind our project. Our goal with Push is to motivate our community to not only envision, but push for a world where kindness is a way of life.

What it does

Push is a revolutionary app which utilizes proven motivational practices enabling users to do small acts of kindness each day. Users are able to earn points for the acts of kindness they complete with our simple point accumulation algorithm which takes into account things like how frequent the user completes tasks. Users are also able to compare their score against those in a global leaderboard and a smaller group leaderboard which demonstrates Users sharing a similar topic-based group of which, the User decides to join. Push is designed to be an easy-to-use and fun app to not only encourage and promote healthy acts of kindness spreading a deeper sense of community and friendliness on an individual day-by-day level, but to also gamify that experience to further encourage users to not just complete tasks but to complete tasks regularly as well.

How we built it

Push was built using MongoDB to store User data, Kotlin and Compose for Android Development and UI, Python for Algorithms and other needs, AWS for server communications, and OpenAI's ChatGPT for creative and natural sounding tasks for Users to perform

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into was integrating all of the different aspects of this project together. Previously we have all worked extensively on web-based projects, however, for this competition we wanted to make a shift to focus on Mobile Application Development, and specifically on Android. This shift also came with its own set of challenges, namely working to develop a deeper understanding of Kotlin, Compose, Android Studio, and Android libraries. Although having some prior experience building small apps in our spare time, a project this extensive is something we've never done for Mobile, which of course was a major difficulty.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are incredibly proud of all of the work put into our project and how we as a team were able to balance each other's skills out and learn from the mistakes we made progressing through this competition. However, we are especially proud of our simple yet effective point calculation algorithm which not only calculates a Users score but also takes into account a User Streak giving incentive for users to return daily. We were also very proud of our ability to pick up and understand Mobile Development, the final product turned out not looking perfect, but functioning better than some of our past web-based projects and giving us a much deeper understanding of all aspects of development.

What we learned

The main things we learned as a team were Mobile Development with Compose and Kotlin, Mongo DB, and knowledge of new Python libraries we have not used before

What's next for Push

Our future goals for Push would be to develop the UI more and tailor to a wider audience by simplifying the experience and improving the color and branding of our application. Along with this we would also work on improving the point calculation algorithm to include more factors like number of total tasks a User has ever completed and so on. The biggest thing we would look into for the future of Push, would be researching more ways we could encourage Users to return daily to encourage more acts of kindness. This could be done using popular frequency encouragement methods such as things similar to the widely popular Spotify Wrapped

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