Clockwork PlanIt

A time management utility intended to promote attentive studying habits by eliminating distractions.

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Inspiration

Elena is unable to stay focused while completing her homework. She is always distracted by the internet, especially YouTube. However, she was not able to find any effective solutions for this problem. Some extensions do exist on the Google Chrome Webstore which block distracting websites, however, they are not very user friendly and Elena find it hard to customize these applications to fit her needs. Therefore, she wanted to create a more customizable, student friendly and effective solution for her problem.

What it does

The user is able to add assignments to the extension, by specifying a name and how long they think it will take them to finish. In this way, our extension also serves as a planner to help students to organize their assignments. Then, users will select an assignment. A clock will start running with the amount of time they specified, and users will not be allowed to access any websites on the blacklist until they choose to take a break or finish their time. When users finish an assignment or study for a designated amount of time, they are gifted with 5 minutes of break time. A chrome notification/alarm will appear in order to notify about the end of their assignment and prompt them to decide their next step.

How we built it

We built our idea as a chrome extension so we would have access to the urls of the websites users would be visiting. Our extension is built using html, css, javascript, and various APIs.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a lot of challenges... here are a few:

  1. We had trouble getting the front-end and back-end to work together.
  2. We had a LOT of trouble trying to get our two js scripts (background and content script) to communicate with each other. We were unable to overcome this challenge even with help from mentors, but we managed to find a work-around.
  3. The timer!!
  4. Some styling issues with trying to keep various elements in certain places.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

First of all, our timer works! We're proud that our forms work, and the back end - front end communication is so complex and awesome! Our UI is also very smooth and user-friendly.

What we learned

We learned how to use HTML forms, work with js, and make a chrome extension! :)

What's next for Clockwork PlanIt

We plan to increase the functionality to full. Currently our product does not work at the extent in which we expect it to function, but it has significant functionality that we can easily improve. We also plan on creating a "black list" which builds onto itself based on user input.

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