StepUp

Inspiration

We are a team of four former student-athletes. Every minute of college is busy, and we can't always make time to work out. However, we can stay active by getting our steps in. We wanted to merge our competitive drive with the technological connectivity of today’s fitness tools to keep each other moving.

What it does

StepUp is a gamified step-tracking app that encourages friendly competition and connectivity. By encouraging the user to be more active, their quality of life will be vastly improved! StepUp takes input from the user about how many steps they walk each day and formats it into a chart, leaderboard, and more! Upon initial launch, the user will be prompted to sign up for an account using their preferred email. After signing up, the user will be met with a multitude of different fun challenges, encouraging them to get more steps in! These challenges range from friendly battles to boss battles to pure distance challenges! We even included features like friendly leaderboards, messaging, and external invites. StepUp is sure to boost users' physical activity, as well as social connectivity!

How we built it

First, we split our group into two teams: front-end development and back-end development. Our back-end developers worked in Python and used Flask and SQLAlchemy to construct the app's database. Our front-end team spent a lot of time learning React-Native Expo and JavaScript to construct and design the User Interface. The front-end developers operated in VSCode. During UI testing, we used Xcode to view the changes to the interface in real time. Once we were satisfied with both ends, we integrated the database into VSCode to complete the app. Many adjustments were made to the UI through testing and configuring the screens until we were satisfied.

Challenges we ran into

Front-end development was the hardest part. None of our team members had experience with JavaScript or React-Native-Expo so we spent a large chunk of our time simply learning how to go about developing the UI. Furthermore, our physical machines presented their own challenges as well. During our brainstorming process, we decided that we wanted to develop an IOS app, since most people have iPhones. However, we came to realize that the Xcode IOS Emulator tool could only run on Mac machines. The team member who was working on the UI has a Windows machine and could not access Xcode. To solve this issue, he had to swap machines with another one of our members who did have a Mac, which was quite tedious. Ultimately, configuring our many features like the leaderboard, boss challenges, and step-charts proved to be quite difficult, but due to our resourceful and hardworking members, we were able to achieve results that we are now satisfied with. Lastly, we attempted to integrate Apple's Health app by using the HealthKit API, but were not able to smooth out the bugs before the deadline.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Due to the fact that our team was inexperienced with React-Native Expo and JavaScript, we are most proud of how visually pleasing our User Interface turned out. Building the front-end took a lot of trial and error from our developers and lots of time studying the syntax and uses of code before even getting into the construction of the app. Furthermore, we are very proud of the fun and creative ways that we implemented tools of motivation for the user. To address the prompt of improving people's quality of life, we wanted to find a way to help people improve both their physical health and social interconnectedness, and our app does just that! We are very pleased with how StepUp turned out, and truly believe it can benefit anyone who uses it!

What we learned

We learned how to problem-solve and learn new skills on the fly. As previously mentioned, we were not equipped with front-end skills before the Hackathon, but now we are! We also learned how to collaborate as a team and use our unique skill sets for the betterment of our project.

What's next for StepUp

We reach the entirety of UF and beyond! Improving lives one step at a time!

Another repo link that was created after submission: https://github.com/rickpatking/stepupfinal-direct-

Built With

• flask
• github
• javascript
• python
• react-native
• react-native-expo
• sqlalchemy
• visual-studio-code
• xcode