House Rules

For people sharing a living space with others, House Rules gamifies chores, incentivizing their completion and in a fun and fair way.

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Inspiration

Once upon a time, our team members' roommate significantly inconvenienced said team member and essentially left the team member responsible for cleaning up after him. This team member endured great hardship and after sharing similar experiences with the rest of his soon to be Hackathon team, the idea for House Rules was conceived.

What it does

House Rules gamifies the process of completing chores by incentivizing finishing them on time in a fun and fair manner. Specifically, it assigns a monetary value to each chore and based on some cycle length and deadline agreed upon by the house, the app will randomly assign the chores to the members of the house.

At the beginning of each cycle, house members are charged for the cost their assigned chores are worth. Then, each member has until the chores' specified deadline to complete the chore or they risk losing the money they were charged. In the event they complete it on time, they will receive the corresponding amount back, however, in the event that the chore remains incomplete, it becomes available for others to take on and win the amount the chore is worth. Moreover, House Rules provides a feature for compensating those who incurred significant hardships in their living situation, separate from recurring chores, such as cleaning up after a party or utility maintenance. When a hardship charge is requested, to keep things fair, either a supermajority of the house or the accused must confirm there was indeed a hardship for the payment to go through.

How we built it

To build this, we spent time planning the application's tech stack, class structure, and data flow on paper and whiteboard. This pre-planning stage helped us immensely, as we were able to divide up into two pairs, where one was more back-end focused while the other was front-end focused.

We used React Native as our primary technology for developing the user interface, along with Firebase as our back-end database.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main issues we ran into was the drifting of the model interface while we were working in parallel. When we met to prepare to merge our halves together, we faced more complications than expected because we were essentially working with two dialects of the model. Furthermore, we ran into issues with separation of concerns, as we were not always clear on what parts of the pipeline our codebases were supposed to handle.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of how the entire product came together in the end, despite us working in parallel with some setbacks along the way as we merged our code together. We believe that our idea has a lot of potential and we are excited to continue working on it beyond this Hackathon.

What we learned

As a group, we learned React Native, as none of us had used the technology before in a project. Additionally, we grew together as a group and learned how to work very well with each other.

What's next for House Rules

Our future plans for the application include fleshing out the UI/UX design, adding push notifications, and completing the implementations for all the features we are excited about seeing. For example, we currently do not support one user being in multiple houses, but we were careful to structure the database and data access pipeline in such a way as to easily allow this feature to be implemented. Therefore, we believe that this application is very scalable.

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