Widget's Wonder Pets

Our website!
Our pets!
Berry on our screen!

Inspiration

We wanted to create a fun but helpful project for college students like us, who spend hours on end on our screens. We also all really enjoy cute gifs and desktop pets, so that’s how Widget’s Wonder Pets came to life! A little buddy on your screen while you work and gives you reminders periodically to take care of yourself and take a break.

What it does

Widget’s Wonder Pets is a desktop pet. Select which pet you want, and it appears to accompany you on your screen while you work! Every hour, it gives you either a reminder, a fun fact, or an encouraging message.

How we built it

We built Widget’s Wonder Pets using Python, and the Python’s GUI library Tkinter.

Challenges we ran into

As a collective team, we did not have much experience using the Tkinter library, so learning how to use that was a bit difficult. For some of us, it was our first time using branches, so it was a bit confusing at first. We also navigated through some merge conflicts, but we learned so much about version control and GitHub through overcoming these challenges!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of the fact that Widget’s Wonder Pets actually works as we envisioned and that we all were able to agree on an MVP for this project. We’re also proud of how much we learned through this hackathon - because we are all walking away with a deeper understanding of Python, GUIs, and using git to work with a team.

What we learned

Through this project, we developed a deeper understanding of python and GUIs, specifically, how to use Tkinter. We also gained more experience using git branches to work together as a team.

What's next for Widget's Wonder Pets

There are so many more things we’d like to implement in Widget’s Wonder Pets if we had more time and bandwidth! One idea would be to implement the OpenAI API to produce personalized messages for our desktop pets. We also want to have a larger variety of wonder pets because the more the merrier, always!