Betflix

Inspiration

Our inspiration for the project was our inherent love for gambling. We saw the issue of screen time being the perfect issue to address this prompt, and we discussed how we can come up with a more permanent motivator to stop using those apps. And nothing is more motivating than money and bragging rights among friends.

What it does

Our app matches friends and enables them to bet against each other using in app tokens (purchased by the users). The user with less screen time total or on the specified app wins the bets and the tokens (minus a transaction fee). Those tokens can then be cashed out at any time.

How we built it

We used Kotlin on an Android simulator for the front end development, with an emulator to display our results. On the back end, we used Python, Flask, and MongoDB for our database management, validation, tokens, and all other back-end functions.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into some issues using the emulator, trying to get front-end mechanics to display properly while also gathering the correct information we needed for the back-end processing. We did a lot of reading about the language and troubleshooting to determine how that information was going to be collected and sent back to our server for processing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud to get functionality using Kotlin, a language we were learning how to use for the first time. Getting a database set up and a server to connect our front and back end was a big accomplishment as we were able to get information properly transferred after a fair amount of troubleshooting.

What we learned

App development is a complex process with many components. It takes a significant amount of planning and some back-end parts cannot begin development until some front-end parts are finished as they depend on the functionality of those initial functions. We also learned how great of an effect teamwork has on a condensed project like this as we have to ensure each component follows the same format and can be used to communicate with each other.

What's next for Betflix

We're going to continue with UI development and fixing up functionality through prototyping and seeing what can be improved upon. At that point we're seeking to expand with some marketing to test it out on a real user base.