Latchkey

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  This is the code used to create the elements on the "Cooking" section of Latchkey.

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  This is the code used in the "Outdoor" section of Latchkey.

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  This is the code used to create each button in the "Self Care" section of Latchkey.

Inspiration

A lot of our team has struggled with growing up alone at times. It may be parents that aren't always around, divorces or even deaths. Kids need a mentor to help teach them. That's why we built Latchkey.

What It Does

Latchkey uses its UI to teach kids concepts and ideas that they may not learn how to do alone. Whether it's playing sports, cooking, outdoor care or even self care, Latchkey is there to help teach you. When you select the topic you want to learn how to do, Latchkey supplies articles handwritten by our team with helpful pictures.

How We Built It

Our team built Latchkey using MIT App Inventor. We used a system of screens and buttons to flow through the information and content in our app. We used a system of reactions to open and close labels that display information about the specific section when they receive certain input from the user. We used many images and visuals for buttons to increase user engagement and interest. As our target audience includes younger children, increasing user engagement and visuals was a must for our product to succeed with our user. Overall, this app was coded in MIT App Inventor using a series of screens, labels, and buttons, as well as other elements.

Challenges We Ran into

The challenges we ran into were endless. This was our first time coding and we had never done a competition like this before. Our original ideas were all scrapped once we put more thoughts into them. When we decided that Latchkey was the best idea we made a plan. We were going to have videos made by us for each thing. That failed when the MIT app inventor decided videos weren't the plan. We also faced challenges trying to keep ourselves motivated to participate, especially when the homework load of an early college crept up on us.

Accomplishments That We're Proud of

We are very proud of each other. The accomplishments on the creation of the app were great but learning to work together was even better. Believe it or not we had lots of strife in the start of the competition. Once we worked through that everything was easy. Our accomplishments became a thing when Connor coded, Nic wrote articles, Carter and I (Aidan) made and wrote the videos as well as brainstorming.

What We Learned

We learned what it means to work together from start to finish by creating an app that addresses a problem in our community. We learned how to code from scratch. We got better at using PrPro for videos and we learned how to work on a deadline.

What's Next for Latchkey

Latchkey really has endless opportunities. There's so many articles to write, ideas to have, additional features to be made. We had a list of over one hundred problems. We had to bring it down to twenty for the app to fit the deadline. But there are hundreds of things to add. Latchkey could really help people, maybe even incorporating chat rooms to help.

Built With

• adobe
• mit-app-inventor