Liberate

Inspiration

As humans, we’ve all struggled with breaking free from guilty cycles of doing things we shouldn’t. We wanted to build a solution to liberate ourselves and others from these patterns. Our focus for this application was developing awareness of these cycles, because we know that if we never recognize the problem, it will never get solved. Through our webapp, we hope to help people be more mindful about their decisions to use certain apps and to provoke reflection so they can understand themselves better and create systems to live happier lives.

What it does

Liberate is a webapp designed to help you create awareness around your tech addictions so you can break free from the guilt of mindless app usage. It does this by asking the user a few initial questions centered around what they enjoy doing, the type of area they live in, and the apps their want to block. Whenever a user opens an addictive app, Liberate detects this, pops up in an application, and asks a few questions that are designed to help the user develop awareness of their negative habits. After, it provides personalized suggestions on healthier things to do instead of opening the addicting app (by utilizing the user’s answers to the initial survey.)

How we built it

We built the entire app mainly using Tarui, the ChatGPT API, and React.

Challenges we ran into

Building the project - as first & second year CS students, this was incredibly hard to build within a span of 48 hours. We had to self-learn a lot of languages/frameworks in a very short time-span.
Fleshing out the idea - it took us a while to decide on an idea

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Presenting and going through with it even though nothing is perfect

What we learned

Prioritize tech functions to build (focus on MVP!)
Create a list of each hacker's strengths and weaknesses (especially techwise) so it's easier to collaborate