GooseLife

Level 0 Goose
Initial Planning Phase on Whiteboard
Profile name and Profile picture
Home screen
Geese section

Inspiration

With the University of Waterloo being such a huge part in this hackathon, we decided to go about tackling a huge problem that students face which is their negative habits. When we asked UWaterloo students on campus, the majority of them admitted to having bad habits such as staying up very late, skipping meals, having a poor social life and procrastinating often. And so, with these problems in mind, our team decided create an interactive and fun app that resolves these poor habits.

What it does

The app is essentially designed to improve students general well being such as sleeping and eating on time, exercising regularly and of course, staying clean. The app does this all through a gamified app, utilizing a stats and points system in which students are rewarded for their efforts in bettering their wellbeing. Furthermore, to keep the UW spirit, the app is themed around the infamous Waterloo geese where everyone's avatar is a goose. We even went one step further to create a level system where students can level up their own peroneal goose by performing tasks! With this goose feature we also implemented a "Connect with Geese" page to allow for more socialization. This page contains a search bar at the top which helps users filter the people they want to find based on gender, year of study, exercise and study level (Level 0-5). The app then recommends different Geese that are suitable toward the filter. This feature was created in hopes that it would allow students to connect with like-minded individuals and ultimately foster a sense of community.

How we built it

The app was built using React native, HTML/CSS and Javascript. Additionally, we also used the Cohere AI API to set up the daily fact generator. We also used the website Figma to initially plan out our app design so it could be followed when we started programming it. For collaboration our team used GitHub so we could easily push and pull changes.

Challenges we ran into

A large challenge that we ran into was setting up Cohere AI's API. Since it was our first time integrating an AI API into a project this task proved to be difficult. We found some sources that covered this topic except it was difficult to find one that could be integrated into our project without having to do major changes.
Another challenge that we faced was creating assets for our app. Since we wanted the app to feel like a game and be fun, it was basically required that we needed good looking assets and art. This proved to be a very hard task since given the time we had, art was very tough to make good.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Since some of us are relatively new to hackathons, the different languages, frameworks and API's we used were actually very new to us. Although there was lots of struggle to work with them initially, we were ultimately able to overcome these challenges and gain future knowledge such as using Cohere AI's API, building apps using react native and the expo platform, and even using GitHub desktop to collaborate. For many of us, it was our first time using these tools so we're very proud that we were able to learn and use them within the project in such a short time especially since they will come in handy for future hackathons!

What we learned

One thing that our team definitely learned about was the method of problem solving. During our project each and every single one of us encountered different problems that required unique solutions to solve. We learned that solving unknown problems is not an easy task and requires a sacrifice of sanity, time and a lot of innovation. For example when we were setting up an emulator to test the app, their were issues with the android controller that prevented it from worked. For the next 2 hours we had tried everything but it still didn't work, but with patience and innovation our team thought to ask for a USB cable to connect to an actual phone physically instead. And shortly after the problem had been worked around. Additionally, we also learned to work together as a team. Although our team had some weaknesses in programming, we were all able to help out in different ways which effectively lead to a productive teamwork environment. And of course, we cannot forget all the new software that we had to use in the hackathon. This hackathon gave many novel experiences to us hackers and taught us how to use API's in general, integrate AI API's, build apps with react and much more!

What's next for GooseLife

With our app catering towards UW students of this age, it is important to keep the experience fun and intriguing to encourage them to keep up their wellness. Thus, Improving the gamification aspect of the app was important in order to make it feel more interactive and entertaining. Some of these change could include achievements, more ways to earn tokens and more geese. Being able to connect, add and message other people to boost social life.