Tacked

Keep yourself accountable with Tacked. Compete with your friends and help each other create, manage, and tackle your to-do lists.

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Inspiration

As students, we are no strangers to the challenges posed by COVID-19. Beyond the obvious technical limitations, digital learning also hampers the competitive environment that keeps so many students motivated. With this in mind, we felt that the best way to address the prompt (enabling communication, engagement, and connectivity among students in the wake of COVID-19) was to revitalize this environment—to provide a platform for friendly competition among students and bring motivation through accountability back to the classroom.

What it does

Tacked is, at its base, a to-do list app. What sets it apart from other programs is that your progress is made public to your friends. On your dashboard, progress bars indicate how far both you and your friends have made it through your agendas, and text indicators show exactly what task they're working on.

To use the app, you must create an account with your full name and email. When you're logged in, you can add tasks to your to-do list and strikethrough what you've completed. You can also add friends by their email, and when they accept, you will both be added to each other's dashboards (where you can monitor your tasks and progress).

How we built it

Tacked was developed using Google's Dart and Flutter, which let us develop for mobile (iOS and Android) and web simultaneously. We used GitHub, GitBash, and VS Code's built in git functionality for version control. Outside of framework, our two programmers used pair programming to jointly develop the app.

Challenges we ran into

Though some of us were familiar with Flutter, this was definitely still a learning experience—those of us who were more well versed still had to brush up on the latest version of the software. (We spent like two hours trying to fix a scoping issue in the navigation). We also had a pretty hard time coming up with the idea. We racked our brains for about three hours, discounting numerous subpar ideas before we came upon something that we actually felt was impactful.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Two of our teammates entered this competition with virtually zero app development experience. After this, I think that we can all say that that we have at least a rough grasp on how the process works. We're also proud of the fact that we could help address this issue in any way, and help get things on their way back to normal after

What we learned

Karmen and Aaron had no coding experience going into this hackathon and learned a lot about the software development cycle and coding in general. They learned about how an app is put together and the different technologies that go into it. They helped wireframe the layouts, create presentations, and think through the different screens of Tacked, which taught them the basics of outlining a big project. Our programming leads also had their work cut out for them. Through this hackathon, they were able to further their understanding of app development as a whole, Flutter and Dart specifically, and also discovered how useful pair programming can be (this is something we'll definitely use again).

What's next for Tacked

As we continue development, we plan to polish the layout of the app, add features, and improve overall usability. Some features that think are important to build are push notifications, the ability to flag tasks for your friends that you may need help with, more effects (confetti, achievements, etc.) to reward goal completion, and the ability to sort tasks based on category and group. Overall, there's much to add, but we're definitely happy with what we were able to accomplish this weekend.

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