Inspiration
When we were coming up with a theme for this, we spent a lot of time thinking about what to make. Then we took a step back and thought about our own experiences, struggles, and hardships and started brainstorming ways we can help people of the same age. We thought, what do we face? Or what is something common that most young adults struggle with or a good life skill that is essential for them? That is how we came up with our project, Ownpace, to help young adults who want to be more independent, learn new skills, or just improve their life. We found similar apps like Headspace and Duolingo, which do help people, but not in a very specific way for our target users. We wanted to make something more, something that has not been done and something that could help young people through common problems like communicating and socializing, to improve their life in a positive way. This is what inspired Ownpace, the app to help young adults.
What it does
Ownpace: Empowered Living
Communicate better: Improve your communication skills by speaking with a fully voiced chatbot that will provide a unique speaking prompt each day and perform a detailed step-by-step assessment.
Learn basic life skills: Use in-app lessons to learn everyday life skills and new practical knowledge, like how to change a lightbulb, how to cook a meal for yourself for the first time, or how to improve your personal hygiene.
Goals: Set personal goals for personal development and growth.
How we built it
We used Python with HTML and CSS with Flask and tried to incorporate MongoDB to store recorded messages to send to the chatbot. We used Figma to design and prototype the interface.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into a lot of challenges.
Keagan: To begin with, working with Python and HTML was a topic that I have not dived too deep into and had to learn a lot of the coding practice and syntax from scratch. Alongside that, working with speech-to-text conversions and storing that into a string to send to the chatbot was super difficult but we were not able to find a solution to that (one of our group members left early who had experience in doing so). In addition, working with the database was not an easy task to implement in the final project because the inconsistent data gave us errors.
Another challenge we had was coordinating the entire project together because we all had different components and features and it was hell to implement all of them together, we should have worked on the same branch from day one. We had too many features that we wanted to implement and we did not plan enough time to finish, complete and implement it successfully into the project. Our team of 3, we are all beginner level hackers and not that experienced so learning everything was kind of new to us. Also one of our group members had to leave midway.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
First-time experience of a Hackathon, our failed attempts (because they serve to motivate us more into the future), the uniqueness /originality of the idea and much more.
What we learned
Keagan: That I am a noob (newbie) and inexperienced to coding when it comes to actually programming things for a real task
Jessie: Working with developers and use Github
What's next for Ownpace
AI suggestions for tasks Develop goal section, should be not just educational but also allow for users to set goals
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