Inspiration
Our inspiration for the site was because of an article on ecopsychology. This specifically refers to the notion that spending time in nature improves brain function, reduces stress levels and overall makes you for calm. A study with 20,000 people proved that spending a minimum of 2 hours outside, per week would drastically make someone happier. This 20,000 pool of people included people of various ethnicities, occupations and some even with disabilities. With the new found understanding on how nature benefits one's mental health, there are many solutions floating around that could potentially improve someone's time outside. For example, forest schools are becoming more prevalent throughout the US which are schools that are located outside in nature. However, the problem with this is that these types of schools are extremely expensive and currently only a select group of people in society of able to afford these types of schools. If students aren't able to attend forest schools, then another solution needs to be put into place. Our website helps students schedule time outside by letting the user input activities and then proceeds to work around those activities to schedule time for the user to be in nature.
Target Audience
Students in middle school, high school, and college who have a busy schedule.
What it does
Allows users to fill out a form to schedule their daily tasks- has input fields of task names and start and end times of each task. Then, our algorithm chooses the most optimal block of time for the user to take a break.
How we built it
We built our web app using the collaborative code editor VSCode and split up everyone's roles based on their skill levels. We built this project using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for the front-end and Python and Flask for most of the back-end. Lastly, we deployed our web app using Amazon Lightsail.
Frontend
The frontend task is to create a web app with a sleek and professional UI/UX design with neutral colors to help our student users feel at ease. We also designed the daily task form to be as easy and straightforward as possible for users to easily enter in their tasks.
Backend
The backend needs to work around the user's schedule and find the optimal time when they aren't occupied to recommend them to go outside. The API does this by finding all the holes in the schedule, then weighing their proximity to noon (most likely to have nice weather) against their length to score them. The window of time with the highest score is recommended.
Challenges we ran into
One challenge we faced during the creation of this web app was connecting the front-end and back-end of our project together. Many of our team members are either new to back-end, new to front-end, or new to developing dynamic web apps and was our first time working together as a team and had some confusion as to how to combine the parts of our web app together.
In the end, we decided to use VSCode to connect automatically to Github to put all our files together and seamlessly transfer the code to Github. We also decided to make a switch from C# to Python for the back-end due to its higher reliability. At the start, we did have trouble deciding what programs we would need to combine the front-end and back-end part of our project and we had to experiment with various alternatives.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We collaborated and created a functional web app within 24 hours, front-end, back-end, and deployment. We are proud of both the appearance and functionality of Caminder and feel satisfied about the concept of the project as well, as it can potentially be very useful as we are students ourselves. This product effectively fights a real issue in modern education today, which is characterized by endless amounts of work, and helps reduce stress levels and increase the mental health of students by scheduling more time for them to be outside.
What we learned
We learned a lot both as individuals and as a team. We had some members who had never used VSCode before and others who were new to JavaScript, Amazon Lightsail, and many other languages so we all learned the basics of different IDEs and languages together and expanded our knowledge in languages we already had experience in as well.
What's next for Caminder
Due to the time constraints we faced during the hackathon, we were unable to connect a full backend to the frontend. We ended up making another algorithm with regular javascript. In the future we would like to connect the backend to the frontend and we also hope to add mroe features. For example, more exercise routines to our recommended list and to the exercise generator. We're also planning to improve on the Timevity alarm so we can add more hand signals and give the user more control over the program.
Caminder relates to themes of education, mental health, and ecopsychology because its purpose is to support a healthy, balanced daily schedule. Our app makes this ideal schedule a real possibility. In short, our web app effectively boosts the mental health of our students.
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