Trellis

our app icon

Inspiration

Simple yet satisfying - that was the center of our focus as we considered the possibilities of a soothing yet fun mindfulness app, drawing in users by gamifying mundane tasks while also keeping in line with a minimalistic and calming aesthetic. This immediately brought productivity apps we, as students had used ourselves and enjoyed intensely, drawing inspiration from applications like Forest, Flora, and Habitica while gearing it towards academics and UTD more specifically.

What It Does

Trellis is a gamified, cozy garden app that encourages mindfulness and fuels academic responsibility by gamifying tasks like consistent dedication to classes, weekly journaling, daily check-ins and other mini games where users cultivate a virtual plant for every class they have, watering it bit by bit with every class attended and activity completed as it grows larger.

How We Built It

We built our app using Expo, a web compiler supporting React Native that allowed us to build a native mobile app that could be prototyped on both the web and connected mobile phones. With the assistance of each other, as well as support from online resources, we gradually became familiar with the platforms and the languages, leading to a working product that aligns closely with our goals.

Challenges We Ran Into

Our biggest challenges were certainly learning to use Expo and work with React.js for both backend and frontend, especially as a team with no experience using these tools. There was also the matter of figuring out how to work with the APIs since the logic proved to be a great obstacle and often contradicted performance expectations, forcing us to constantly replan and rework our strategies.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

The team worked incredibly well as a whole, brainstorming and generating ideas effortlessly. This left us with a solid game plan and app design we all agreed and approved of early on in the process, removing a multitude of obstacles as we entered the execution phase, feeling confident in our vision and our team.

What We Learned

One of the biggest things we learned from this experience was how to create our first working app. Initially, we all had experience in different parts of app design/development, but not the main code in Expo. It was a learning experience because we created an initial plan during our brainstorming session of how we would like our layout to look, and we encountered some challenges while trying to execute this. For example, we thought of incorporating an image carousel containing the different plants of our wellness app. We all knew how to incorporate buttons and images, but we did not know exactly how to execute both of these functions together. Through a lot of research and code examples, we finally found a way to execute what we had envisioned for our app. I found that we learned a lot about how to manipulate the code of an app to reflect the exact changes that we wanted, and we also learned how to divide and conquer the code. Some worked on the design to create a good user experience, while others worked on the functionality of the code.

What's Next For Trellis

We are hoping to expand resources for students to access through incorporating APIs to increase the campus connectivity of our app. We want to increase student engagement with their peers because it will contribute to their well-being and self-esteem. We will try to incorporate suggestions for our users based on their preferences to participate in like organizations or club events that would pique their interest. Our group is going to try and add more mini-games to our app to increase the mental health awareness component. Overall, I feel that we have more work to do on our app to reach the potential we hope to achieve by giving this to student users.