Tuff Enough

Inspiration

Our entire group is interested in fitness and bodybuilding. We already had some ideas for the hackathon since the theme perfectly fit our interests. We decided on a body-building thing due to it being something that we all admire from time to time.

What it does

Our website prompts the user to log in and it takes them to their first "arena" where their character has the smallest build. The user then is prompted to log workouts into the website. For each exercise that is logged, their progress bar goes up until it reaches 100% completion for the arena. From there, we take the user to the next page and now they need to complete more exercises to get to the next arena. This encourages users to take their time. This isn't supposed to be a race. It's supposed to be an experience.

How we built it

Since we wanted to make something user-friendly, we decided to go the web development route to make sure we have 100% customizability and we don't accidentally limit ourselves with the tools we have. We made different pages for the arenas and had different characters showcasing what a bodybuilder from that arena would look like. We aren't saying the user should look like that. This project was inspired by people who bodybuild in their daily lives. We just want to show what a possible goal could be for people that want to get started.

Challenges we ran into

A big challenge we ran into was learning the languages we were using. Most of our team members had never dealt with HTML, CSS, or Javascript; we decided we wanted to challenge ourselves because of it was our first Hackathon. I think this was a very healthy challenge that showed us the real difficulties of creating a website while sleep-deprived and hungry. Another challenge we ran into was creating something that would log the exercises that the user had done. One of our team members decided to take this task head-on and surprisingly learned some of the beginning fundamentals of back-end development for websites. This was very exciting for all of us because we didn't have too high of hopes of what we were capable of due to our lack of experience overall, but when we were thrown into the abyss and told to strap on our boots and get to it, we learned something new! Finally, the challenge we all had to deal with was realizing that our product wasn't going to be perfect, completely finished, or, at times, pretty to look at. This was our first time extensively coding together (in a brand new language), using Github to share our progress, and in general spending the next 24 hours together. We just want to show that whatever we end up with is a hopeful dream that we can maybe one day fulfill later in our college careers.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Like I said earlier, the experience bar going up depending on the user adding fitness logs was a challenge, and our team member Bryan was able to figure it out, with the help of Deuce. Deuce was an awesome mentor for these 24 hours and gave us the best help for Javascript, so I just wanted to give him a shout-out to him and his jug of tea. The progress bar works perfectly and we made it do some extra things like automatically go to the next page. Elmer was the team member tasked with the back-end coding that we needed to store values. This was mainly helped by YouTube, but when Deuce came in he helped us get that process more optimized. Rover, Christian, and Daniel are proud of taking up the challenge of learning 3 new types of programming languages in 24 hours and successfully creating a product that they're happy about.

What we learned

We learned how to better cooperate as a team and make sure everyone has an even amount of work to accomplish. We also learned that coding takes patience and not everything will happen the first time every time (especially if the language is brand new to you). Finally, we learned to ask for help when we need it. Because we asked for help, we were able to improve and better stylize our website.

What's next for Tuff Enough

Tuff Enough (soon could change to "Tuff Enuff" because it is a play on the stereotypes that people who go to the gym are not the smartest, but this website was made by smart individuals who go to the gym) could end up being a passion project for our group. We could introduce this to the rest of our friend group who sadly couldn't make it today and let them help us improve the website and its functionality. The important to always get more import from other people's perspective. Although we didn't fulfill our starting ambitions for the website (i.e. Customizable Avatar), we now have a working framework to base the rest of our work off of. This project could be something that we work on over the summer as a group to not lose the skills we have gained throughout the semester.