Created for FemmeHacks 2021 by Katherine Chen, Subin Kim, Rowena Lu
This app was inspired by our lives as students doing remote learning amidst the pandemic. Trapped at home, it has been difficult to motivate ourselves to wake up for classes. We hit the 'snooze' button more frequently in blurred cycles of sleeping, eating, and studying. Studies have shown that waking up happy and feeling motivated helps improve mental health and productivity. Therefore, we wanted to create a cute app that acts as a daily dose of motivation, keeps people on track, and reminds them of their goals.
The app contains a cute little dinosaur named Dino who guides the user on an alarm-goal-setting journey. Each day before going to bed, the user sets their goals (divided into categories of work, social, self-care, health, etc.) for the next day. When they wake up, they participate in a short bubble-popping activity that reminds them of their goals and in addition, surprises them with motivational words or images such as inspirational quotes.
We developed the app in Android Studio using Java and XML. We coded four Activities each containing several interactive Views and connected them with an overarching narrative. Graphics are original and were created using Adobe Draw and Adobe Photoshop.
This was our first hackathon experience, first time coding in Android, and first time really using GitHub. Learning new development tools on the spot to create a fully functioning app involved a lot of tutorial searches, and troubleshooting was difficult simply because we were not familiar with Android, especially how the Java files communicate with the XML files.
We learned Android from the ground up and created a functioning app within a day. This was a major accomplishment for all of us.
We learned Android app development, how to effectively divide tasks, how to work under time pressure.
We realize a lot of "motivation" comes from interactions with friends, so we want to implement a feature that allows friends to see and learn from each other's goal-setting progress. We want to add more personalization and expand on the idea of "balancing between sleep, academics/work, socializing, and self-care."
adobe-draw android android-studio java photoshop xml