Attendr

Inspiration

The inspiration for this project (in general) came from the theme of this year's hackathon: health and wellbeing. As college students, we see every day how the stress of college and everything to balance can become overwhelming. It can be very easy to fall into the rut of skipping more and more classes every week, and feeling lazy. This laziness leads to feelings of unproductivity, and eventually prolouged stress. The feeling of always falling behind is all too common. This is what inspired us to create Attendr.

What it does

Attendr is a mobile app that gamefies going to your lectures and earning points. This unique app also allows you to connect with friends and join groups, where you can comete against each other for the highest score. This friendly competition motivates students to attend their classes and to be more socially active, helping college students to feel more productive and stress free.

How we built it

We build Attendr using a django-based backend to store all neccessary data with a frontend based in react-native/Expo. React-native allowed us to grab map data from both Google and Apple maps, allowing the map interface of the app to be easy to use. We were also reccommended to use Expo by the professionals at Pella, as we were looking for something that could easily create a mobile app for both Apple and Android.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many difficulties throughout the creation of this project. This was the first hackathon for all of us, and most of us had never used react-native, Expo, or django before. This turned the project into a very large learning experience, but it was super fun nonetheless. Our main challenges were based around learning all of the ins and outs of each syntax that was used.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our learning capability and our organizational skills. We were able to learn and accomplish a lot in a short amount of time. This was made possible by splitting up the project: Alvin worked mostly on the UI and the web design, Nate worked on the front-end, and I (Vincent) worked mostly on the back-end.

What we learned

We learned a lot about how to use important frameworks such as Expo, django, and react-native, as these are all powerful tools for modern developers. We also learned that it may be wiser in the future to choose a project we are more confident we can complete in the allotted time period, as we may have bit off a little more than we could chew this time.

What's next for Attendr

If we had more time to work on this project, we would've wanted to implement a streak system for indivuduals and groups, (getting a higher streak based on the most consecutive lectures attended). We also entertained the idea (suggested by one of the professionals at Pella) to implement a betting system, allowing you and your friends to enter money into a pot that would be rewarded to the highest-scoring player.