"Self-care Bot"

Inspiration What inspired us to create this program for our first hackathon was the theme "Work from home." Since these are trying times with the pandemic and since many of us are staying at home, many people are struggling with handling the situation. So, we created a self-care bot that asks how the user is feeling and why they may be feeling that way. The program also outputs advice depending on the user's choices. All the code was worked on during the 24 hours that we had.

How we built it We built it using mainly java as that is what we are experienced with. We used methods, loops, and other java programming skills in our project. We first started off by assigning each teammate an emotion to plan a pathway to. After that, we created specific questions for each emotion that the user could answer yes or no to depending on how they are feeling. We added encouraging statements as well as advice because we thought during these trying times a little encouragement would help a lot.

Challenges Since this is our first hackathon in our freshmen year, our coding experience is very limited. Most of us have only taken Programming one where we only learned the basics of java, so our scope was limited. But we still were able to make something fun and enjoyed the experience.

Accomplishments This hackathon really showed us what it was like to collaborate as a team. As a group, we were able to code smoothly with few issues and enjoyed our time. We were able to create something fun with our limited coding experience and that is something that we are very happy with.

What we learned An obvious answer is that we have learned how to work as a team. Because of the pandemic, we weren't able to do group projects in our programming class so to have one of our first team coding experiences be at a hackathon was an invaluable experience.

What's next for "Self-care Bot" Since our coding experience was so limited we weren't able to make the self-care bot to its fullest extent. Our next plan of action would probably be to add images, more questions, and just make this a more personal experience for the user.