Extend Your Horizons

Initial Figma Prototype
Pomodoro Timer Feature
To Do List Feature
Random inspirational quote generator feature with pulsing heart gif
Block Sites Feature
Pomodoro timer started
Another randomly generated quote for inspiration

Inspiration Our inspiration for the TechNova hackathon was to create a practical and multifaceted tool to assist in helping individuals with productivity, efficiency, and mental health/wellness. As students who spend countless hours daily on the internet for the purposes of studying and working, we decided to create a simple yet effective chrome extension to help students increase their focus when working while also promoting sustainable study habits.

What it does Our chrome extension, “Extend Your Horizons”, consists of four components: a Pomodoro timer, a personal to-do list, a customizable website blocker, and an inspirational quote generator. The Pomodoro timer helps increase efficiency, by breaking down work into intervals of 25 minutes, separated by short, 5 minute breaks. The traditional personal to-do list assists in organizing and planning tasks and projects. The next tab, a website block list, prevents distraction by managing and blocking websites. Lastly, taking care of the user’s mental health, the final component generates a random inspirational quote and/or self-care tip at every visit.

How we built it We built our chrome extension in Visual Studio Code with HTML/CSS and JavaScript. We used the google chrome extension documentation to build our first productive extension project. We used git for the workflow.

Challenges we ran into Some of the challenges we first ran into were our lack of experience in building our own extension, as none of us had built something like this before. We found that it was very challenging working in two very different time zones as well, working around our busy schedules while prioritizing the hackathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of This was some of our team members' very first hackathons that involved coding, so we were proud that we were able to accomplish so much in such a short time despite little experience. We were also very proud of our chrome extension's overall design and functionality, as it is something of great personal usefulness, and we were able to accomplish much more than we had initially expected.

What we learned Through this experience, we learned about building a Google Chrome extension, working with JavaScript, collaborating with a team remotely from different time zones, and effective ways to increase productivity during work.

What's next for Extend Your Horizons We have many creative and innovative ideas for pushing our extension to be even better, including using an API to generate inspirational quotes instead of entering a handful into the code ourselves. This allows long-term users to receive original quotes without repetition for a much longer time, improving motivation. Creating productivity, relaxation, and self-care categories for the to-do tab would help individuals organize their goals and focus on the right ones at the right time.