Inspiration
As a team, we're super inspired to tackle the challenge of helping students with ADHD stay focused on their homework. We know that ADHD can make it tough for students to concentrate, and it's largely due to lower levels of dopamine and norepinephrine that affect the frontal lobe, which is responsible for decision-making and attention. It’s frustrating to see classmates struggle to stay on task, especially when they're capable of so much. We want to create something that can help these students stay engaged, manage their time better, and ultimately succeed in their studies. Our goal is to develop a tool that not only keeps them organized but also makes learning more enjoyable and effective!
What it does
Our project focused on developing a platform to assist students, particularly those with ADHD, in managing their homework effectively. The platform offered two distinct modes: Paper Homework and Online Homework, allowing users to choose the mode that best fit their study preferences. It also incorporated eye movement tracking to monitor user engagement, helping to identify when attention drifted. Additionally, users were given the option to enter websites they wished to block, minimizing potential distractions. The platform included a login page for account creation and a logout feature, ensuring a secure and straightforward experience for users. Through these features, we aimed to provide a practical solution to help students stay on task and enhance their productivity.
How we built it
We utilized HTML, JavaScript, and CSS for the front end to create the user interface, while React allowed us to build a dynamic and responsive application. The back end was powered by Python and Flask, enabling us to manage server-side logic effectively. To track eye movement, we incorporated OpenCV and Mediapipe, which provided the necessary functionality for monitoring user engagement. To track our phones, we had to create a new cascade file to identify phones. We trained it on our dataset consisting of around 30 images of phones and around 40 negative images (not phones) For user authentication and management, we integrated PropelAuth, which simplified the login and logout processes. We also employed Firebase as our database solution to store user emails and passwords securely. Additionally, we implemented Plasmo, a Chrome extension, to allow users to block distracting websites during their study sessions.
Challenges we ran into
One big issue was detecting cell phones because we couldn't find the right cascade files to help with that, which really slowed us down. We also had a hard time figuring out how to add the Chrome extension to our project since it was our first time using Flask for the backend. Another challenge was getting warning notifications to work on the website. We faced some errors when trying to fetch data from two localhost servers at the same time, which caused a lot of confusion. Plus, when we were collaborating using VSCode Live Share, we found that only the owner could see the images, so other team members couldn’t view them. This made it harder to work together effectively.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were really proud of how we learned and used new technologies that we hadn't explored before. It was cool to see how everything came together in one project. Even though we faced some challenges, we figured out how to integrate everything, and it felt great to accomplish that as a team. We gained a lot of skills and confidence in the process, which made the whole experience worth it.
What we learned
- We learned how to use PropelAuth to effectively authenticate and manage users. We also learned how to implement PropelAuth with Chrome Extensions using Plasmo.
- We learned how to use Firebase to store the user data and record the blocked websites they had.
- Finally, we learned how to train models on our own datasets
What's next for LockedIn
Since some parts of LockedIn aren't fully put together yet, that will be our future goal. We plan to connect our camera models to a our React frontend and we plan to improve our Chrom and make usage of our product more frictionless!
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