Zotogo

Inspiration

We got inspiration for this because we enjoyed the game Tamagotchi and wanted to create something productive for students as well. We initially thought about making the user have multiple companions, but eventually settled on the great Anteater to act as the first Zotodo mascot.

What it does

This application combines the fun of having and taking care of your own pet with the tough responsibilities of being a college student. We provide incentives to feed your loving pet through the completion of activities, whether it is due the next day, or it is due in the next month.

How we built it

We built this app through the parallel usage of Figma and React, using Figma for general brainstorming and ideas and React for the mobile app itself. We had spent much of our starting time going between multiple frameworks before we finally decided on using React since it had much of the functionality we wanted in our code. We decided that two of us would work on designing portions of the app and the other two would specialize in hard coding. The app itself was extremely challenging as none of us had any experience in coding in JavaScript, and we would be stuck on problems with date and time for a long time.

Challenges we ran into

One of our main challenges was figuring out a way to display and access our mobile application. There were so many different resources and softwares that could help us, but it was hard deciding on one that would be most effective for our application. This was everyone’s first time coding a mobile app, which made the journey a huge learning process for us. It took a lot of time and collaboration to get everyone on the same page and delegate work so we could be an effective team. The next challenge we ran into was configuring the front-end with the back-end. We first decided to split the team up into 2 and 2 in order to divide and conquer. However, we realized this was not as efficient as we thought it would be. To overcome this, we began to communicate a lot more with each other, helping one another to understand their parts in the code. Since we no longer would have to explain things, the code building became a lot more seamless.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This hackathon felt tough since we were learning a completely new language, but we are proud of the code that we ended up with and the things that we learned through this completely blind experience. We were able to implement things and UI in a completely new world, and made a semi-workable app by the end of it, even if it’s not completely finished. We feel that we have learned a lot from this experience from just trying our hands at it, and I think our ideas definitely could have become something unique and fun. Our anteater sprite is a true unsung hero of our project, and we could not have done it without him.

What we learned

Through this hackathon, we learned a lot about front-end and back-end development. Together, we got to become familiar with Javascript and CSS. None of us had ever used React Native before, so it was amazing to see how collaborative coding in real-time works! Applying all of these new tips that we researched, on top of helpful advice from our mentor, really allowed us to grasp further the nature of mobile application development. 
Furthermore, we really understood how coding conventions can really help a coding team and how communication is key to any group project. There’s so many little details within our code that could have made our journey a lot more seamless. Things such as coding comments, intuitive function or variable names, and more structured code would have saved us a lot of time and made things much easier to comprehend. Overall, we really enjoyed this experience as we learned how to become developers within a team. Afterall, amazing designs and applications are not developed by one person.

What's next for Zotodo

In the future, we would really like to implement more interactions with our “pet Petr”. This includes: more heart opportunities, a cleaner and more intuitive UI, and full functionality of our mobile application. I think adding further incentivizing features to our application will make it much more interesting for users.  Overall, we really wish to focus more on the quality of our code that would allow us to implement an application that runs much smoother.

Built With

• figma
• react
• react-native