Grow & Give

A productivity app that provides a special incentive where users accumulate in-game coins from their focused minutes to support real-world nonprofits!

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Inspiration

The “nation’s report card” shows that the COVID pandemic’s school closures erased two decades of progress in math and reading among American children. In a test given to a national sample of about 15,000 students, their reading scores dropped 5 points, the biggest drop since 1990. Additionally, in math, they dropped 7 points, the first time there has been a drop at all since the test began. In addition to significant drops in quantitative test scores, student morale has correspondingly dropped. According to EdWeek Research Center, students self-report less motivation (50%) and lower morale (49%) as compared to their motivation and morale prior to the pandemic. An even larger majority of teachers perceive less student motivation (87%) and lower student morale (82%).

Following these two trends, we can conclude that student motivation to strive for academic improvement has decreased and resulted in lower test scores. Children and teenagers are now turning to their devices for 5 to 7 hours of online recreational activities per day to temporarily escape into a world of mindless scrolling and instant entertainment.

Accordingly, the most effective platform to transform adolescent productivity is their very own iPhone or iPad screen. We thus decided to create an iOS productivity app that students could readily download.

What it does

Grow & Give is an iOS app that not only fosters proactive minds ready to contribute to the workplace but also sets a foundation for kids to develop a sense of responsibility to give back to their community. One key feature is the "Shop," where users’ in-game coins from minutes of focus can be exchanged to nonprofits that #teamtrees and #teamseas. This leverages adolescents’ high levels of generativity--- a concern about making a difference. Our app also involves a process of planning tasks, setting goals, focusing, and reflecting to maximize focus and self-growth.

How we built it

We designed by designing screens on the Xcode Storyboard. We laid out many elements like labels, buttons, and images on the screens for our app. Next, we moved on to connect IBOutlets in the front end with the backend code with Swift, allowing buttons to achieve their functions and popups to appear. We then connected the backend database with a database using the MongoDB API and created a system that stores user data.

During the design phase, we created features to plan tasks, set goals, focus, reflect, complete tasks, and the shop. We also implemented autolayout along with scroll views on every screen and label to make sure that the labels could fit on every screen size. Finally, we sent this completed product to the app store for submission.

Challenges we ran into

While designing, programming, and releasing our app to the world we ran into many technical and marketing difficulties:

  1. Our biggest difficulty was finding a database platform to save user data from our app. We spent days looking through different online tutorials on how to set up a database and ultimately settled on using MongoDB API to manage and send requests in the database.
  2. We noticed that certain elements on the screen would not show up for users with smaller-sized screens which disrupted the user experience. To combat this, we implemented auto layout to designate text, images, and buttons to different parts of the screen based on ratio and the scroll view, allowing users to slide through every part of the screen vertically.
  3. Our first submission to the App Store was filtered out as "Spam" which meant our content was too similar to existing applications. However, after customizing the aesthetic of our screens and adding more unique features such as the User Progress charts and Achievements page, our app was approved.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We're proud of successfully creating an app and publishing it on the app store where we have reached users throughout the US, Mainland China, Malaysia, and France.
  • We are proud of successfully curating a process for students to optimize and improve their productivity. Feedback from our family, friends, and students in our community showed much enthusiasm for this new unique way to motivate their learning and we strive to continue making it better!

What we learned

  • Our team learned how to create an app on Xcode with the Storyboard and the language Swift
  • We learned how to develop a product from the start to finish. Our procedure had 6 main phases:
  1. App Brainstorm (Designing the app screens, brainstorming the logo and name, drawing out a flowchart of the app functionality and features)
  2. Screen Design (Using the Storyboard to make early prototypes of where text, buttons, and images should be placed)
  3. Create a Database (Backend data handling with local data and MongoDB)
  4. Initial Testing (Releasing the app on TestFlight to start an informal round of testing, getting user feedback from family/friends)
  5. Redesign (Redesigning many screens to make buttons more intuitive and the overall theme more aesthetic)
  6. Update (add new features, community outreach, improve user-friendliness) - ONGOING

What's next for Grow & Give

We plan on continuously improving our app through monthly App Store updates. A few of our upcoming goals are to :

  • Create a nonprofit foundation to facilitate the donations in the Shop and receive sponsorships to grow our user base
  • Implement features to improve users’ long-term planning and goals while improving its design and appeal
  • Add social networking capabilities in the app to promote engagement with groups
  • Add additional nonprofits that can support immediate disaster relief or funding
  • Research more into the science behind child psychology and how to implement scientifically-effective features

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