DeltaHabits

Inspiration

These days it seems as though humans are disconnected from one another; although we are at the golden age of technology and social media, it often feels like there is no progress being done to better our social and personal lives. Sadly, it is more clear than ever that technology has disconnected us from each other, and drastically rotted our brains.

With that being said, our team of computer science students are (naturally) technology lovers. That’s why we wanted to give technology a redemption arc! Expecting people to go cold turkey and not touch their phones ever again is unrealistic, that's why we wanted to take the things that are harming us and re-approach them in a way that encourages us to better ourselves and our community.

Using our programming and designing skills, we have created DeltaHabits; an app that allows users to build habits together, and have fun doing so!

We know what you’re thinking, “Ugh. Not another habit tracker app, there's like a million of those already”. Honestly, we would react the same to the idea of habit trackers. The irony with habit trackers is that you’d need to build a habit of tracking your habits to begin with. To mend this, we thought back to our initial problem; people's addiction to technology and social media. That's why we took the addictive aspect of technology and used it to our advantage. We did this by utilizing cute animals, friendship connections, and gaming. To motivate people, and keep up with our central theme of community building, we chose to use something that everyone in our community would love; cute 2D animals (also known as Habitmons)!

What it does

When you track a habit with DeltaHabits, the app gives you a random new Habitmon to grow alongside you on your journey of self growth! Each habit gets a Habitmon, and for every time you log a habit your Habitmon gains XP, which allows you to evolve it overtime. (We figured that having a cute Habitmon grow alongside the user would result in more incentive to keep up with the habit.)

To foster community growth, you can add friends and battle each other’s Habitmons! This feature allows you to keep track of you and your friends’ progress with habits and keep each other motivated and accountable. (nothing wrong with a little friendly competition)

How we built it

Front end:Javascript and CSS

Back end: React-Native and Python

Challenges we ran into

This year, our team tried to qualify for as many categories as we could. We were filled with hope in the beginning of taking on this ambitious challenge, but after 5 hours of being unable to set up Auth0 to work with expo, we decided to abandon that challenge.

Another challenge we faced is having to work with our arch nemesis, CSS.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have never done app development before this hackathon, and we are so proud to have taken on the challenge of approaching a new field of development, given the short amount of time we had. To add to that, we were able to get things working with little difficulty!

What we learned

Our team got to experiment with using react-native for the first time ever! We saw this hackathon as our chance to learn something new together, and we are so happy to have taken on that challenge.

…we also learned that if you only have 24 hours to build a project and you’ve been trying to fix the same issue for 5 hours, you should probably just come up with a new, easier, implementation.

What's next for DeltaHabits

Coming up with ideas for DeltaHabits was an absolute blast, as everyone from our team came up with more and more clever features to add to the app. However, since we only had 24 hours to implement them, we had to be realistic with our time and what we can add.

With that being said, here are some of our favourite features that we hope to add in the future, on our own time:

Using AI to recommend ways to maintain the habit, logical next steps to a habit, advice on how to implement different habits, ways of quantifying progress (if applicable), etc.
Adding a feature to the friends tab that lets you send motivational notifications to your friends
Adding accessories (clothing, food, lil games) that the Habitmons can wear/have; you’d also be able to gift your friends some accessories to encourage them to keep up with their habits.