What inspired your project? The main inspiration for our project came from behavioral science regarding habit formation. According to several modern specialists, the most effective way to form a habit is to make it accessible and easy to do and facilitate a positive emotional response each time the habit is completed. Therefore, we believed that we could create an app that would assist people in developing habits by producing these conditions through a simple gamified system. What problem does your project solve? Our problem solves the issue of lack of engagement in classrooms, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, more than ever students are feeling disconnected from their learning and lacking the motivation to learn. The setup of most school systems encourages students to simply retain information for tests and assignments without emphasizing how this knowledge is valuable or can be applied to the real world, and this makes it difficult for students to find good techniques for long-term learning. How does your project solve the problem? Our project solves this problem by creating a system that allows students to effectively develop positive habits. Through our app, a teacher can create a game, assign the students a goal to complete daily, and gradually eliminate players as they fail to complete the task until only one player remains. Ideally, these games would be intended to run for a long time, and a collaborative environment would be set up where students could encourage one another to succeed. This app facilitates effective habit formation because it encourages teachers to set an attainable goal for their students to achieve every day. For example, this could include spending five minutes reviewing vocabulary or reading ten pages from a book. If the task is small and students can access it through an application, this makes it accessible and increases the likelihood that students will attempt to complete it on a daily basis. After completing the task, students will also obtain a positive emotional response as they continue to the next round and have a greater chance of winning the game. This app introduces a new approach to encouraging positive behavior and good habits among students. Rather than providing students with hours of homework and studying, teachers can give them small, accessible tasks that they are encouraged to complete in an engaging group setting.
What technologies did your project use? Include programming languages, libraries, and any external tools. To build our application, we used Python, Flask, Css, Html, and resources from Bootstrap. While we were working on our project, we also used some video tutorials from youtube to learn programming skills. These included the “Flask Tutorials” playlist by Tech With Tim on Youtube and a tutorial titled “Learn Flask for Python-Full Tutorial” by Jake Rieger on the Youtube channel freeCodeCamp.org. The main language we used while coding was Python, and we used Flask as the framework for our web application. Within this application, a stylesheet was written in Css, and page templates were written in Html. We obtained elements for the navigation bar and table from Bootstrap, which offers a free library of Css elements. The majority of the code was edited in VisualStudio code, and we utilized a Github repository to store and upload our files.
What challenges did you run into? The biggest challenge we faced was having to learn how to program and build an application whilst simultaneously developing our software. We found that it had taken much longer than we had expected to become familiar with the programming language and development process. Therefore, the scope of our project had to be significantly reduced, and we had to utilize relatively simplistic databases and algorithms. Initially, we intended to create an online database with games and allow users to remotely sign in and join games using aliases. However, we found that this would not be possible given our technical capabilities and the amount of time we had. Therefore, we had to revise our original plan to create a prototype that allowed users to create profiles using simple names and run games by manually adding and removing players to a list. This required us to think critically about the specific requirements of our project and think about what was absolutely necessary in our prototype to effectively convey our main idea.
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