Phruggy Study

Study as a phrug, easily ask questions and share notes with your friends and classmates online!

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Inspiration

During our two years of online learning in high school, we experienced the challenges that came with studying with friends while trapped in an online learning model. Online learning was deadly and effective in isolating all of us from each other, where previously we could help each other out in studying and collaborating with assignments. We wanted to come up with a website that could allow users to not only have a platform to easily communicate the necessary materials, but also feel motivated to do so. Throughout the design process, we drew heavy inspiration from our original character, phrug, who has been a joy and light in our academic lives since circa 2021.

What it does

Phruggy study allows you to

  • Select subject specific study rooms with classmates you know irl
  • Chat about anything pertaining to the subject
  • Track your study time

Phruggy study motivates you

  • See your avatar at a click of a button in the bottom right corner
  • See everyone else’s personalized phrugs

How we built it

Using HTML, CSS, Javascript, Socket.io, Express, Node, we used Socket.io to power real-time communication between users in our chatrooms, HTML and CSS to build the front-end, and Javascript for the functionality of the website as a whole.

Challenges we ran into

As always, the limited time restrictions of hackathons we faced was a huge challenge for us, especially as inexperienced coders, with uOttaHack 6 being all our first times attending an in-person hackathon. Once we zeroed in on our idea, we spent many hours initially learning how to use platforms that would allow for real-time transmission of data to create our chat room. Though this didn’t leave us with much time for the actual design and implementation of our website, we were able to come up with a mockup of our website design and brainstormed many directions we could take Phruggy Study together.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This entire journey in uOttaHack 6 has been surreal, but we are so proud of our working finished product, with fully functional chat features that seemed so far out of reach in our early hours of hacking. Throughout these three days here, we’ve learned much more about coding, especially widening our horizons with these six different languages/platforms used in ways we’ve never seen before.

What we learned

On the technical side, we’ve learned tons from this experience on the use of different languages that together make up a whole new website. As a team, we’ve been through so many struggles throughout our time here, from little ones to the huge ones, like the library study room lights that never shut off. Making it through this hackathon could be said to have been a test of the endurance of our will and optimism in life, but we are so proud to have stuck it through and learned the importance of perseverance ever more firmly in life.

What's next for Phruggy Study

We created a more comprehensive plan on Figma for our website, including next steps such as the following functionalities = Ask subject specific question and search for previously asked questions with the top voted answers

  • Attach pdf, png files to easily share your notes
  • Tracking currency for users depending on length of accumulated study time
  • Customizable wardrobe for phrug profile pic characters
  • Earn cosmetics to dress up your avatar as you answer others questions and hit study time goals
  • Community page to show off phrugs
  • Educational events (reading week, specific exam season times) bring time-sensitive cosmetics that must be earned by studying in that period of time
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