Inspiration
The inspiration for this project comes from the personal challenges we all face while studying, such as losing focus, procrastinating, and struggling to stay accountable when working alone. We noticed that traditional study apps rely heavily on self discipline, which often is not enough. FocusStake was created to introduce real accountability through social pressure, gamification, and meaningful consequences to help students stay committed, motivated, and productive together
What it does
FocusStake is a group study accountability app that keeps users focused through social pressure, gamification, and optional financial stakes (fake or real currency). Users can join live study sessions via a code or link, choose a study method (Pomodoro, Flow, Interval, or Custom), and participate in personal, friend, or event sessions. During active sessions, FocusStake uses random focus check-ins and a 3-strike system to enforce accountability, if a user leaves the app or is inactive for more than 5 seconds, a strike is automatically added. Accumulating three strikes results in penalties such as loss of XP, leaderboard position, or forfeiting a stake.
Leaderboards, badges, and XP reward consistent focus, while session analytics help users track productivity. The app monitors or blocks distractions and enables friendly competition or solo focus sessions to build long-term study discipline.
How we built it
This app was built entirely with React Native and TypeScript using the Expo framework. The app navigation is supported by Expo Router, and React Query is used to support custom user context (User exp, currency amount, levels, etc).
The codebase maintains strict TypeScript type safety throughout.
Challenges we ran into
- We had a hard time implementing user profiles since none of the team had experience with it, but we managed to learn the required content to use React Query to help keep track of each users' in app statistics
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Developing a clean UI that allows for intuitive navigation, and using colours and font size to guide users to the main focus of the app
- Challenging ourselves by using tools that we were not familiar with so we can enhance our app experience -Designed a robust session system with retry logic, loading states, and clear error differentiation --- ## What we learned
- All of our team have learned important skills and knowledge in React Native and TypeScript, especially with using Expo Router to create a easy and intuitive experience for users
- Using React Query to organize user statistics
What's next for FocusStake
- Implementing a real payment system
- Implement friends function, where users can search and add other users as friends in the app
- More dynamic focus checks, such as eye-tracking and movement detection
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