PastPractices

Socrate's Path
Aristotle's Path
Plato's Path
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Inspiration

Many of our friends struggle with mental health issues during the hectic, stressful years of high school. In English class, we learned about Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and realized their teachings could help us support those facing these challenges.

What it does

PastPractices takes users on a journey starting from Socrates' teaching of self examination to Plato's imaginative mind and ends with Aristotle's love for science and virtue. Each philosopher offers a wide range of different features, some of them being community based. Each feature reflects practices done by the respective philosopher. Once users unlock a total of 1500XP they will then get access to all features from each philosopher. One of the community features is the "Wisdom Exchange," under the philosopher Plato, where users are encouraged to post about issues they are facing, and then other users are encouraged to respond to the dilemmas and offer their own perspective and advice. There are a multitude of features just as innovative as "Wisdom Exchange!"

How we built it

PastPractices was built in Python using the Django web framework. Django handles everything from the backend to frontend. The backend is purely Python, while the frontend is a mix of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Challenges we ran into

At first, we were unsure on what to create. We thought about heading down the classic, saturated AI route, but we believed that history had more to offer rather than just data. We wanted to bring the old teachings of history into a modern light accessible for all. Another issue was that we were unsure on how to create a meaningful journey for the users; this is where we came up with the idea of philosopher progression. Socrate's focus on self-examination is a perfect warm-up for all users to get comfortable and really understand themselves; Plato's imaginative playground allows users to let their imagination go wild, allowing them to further discover themselves while having fun; Aristotle's push of virtue and science is a perfect closure because it allows users to understand the type of person they want to be in this world.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of creating a fully functional website that delivers our message exactly as we would like it.

What we learned

We learned the importance history can have, though in the past, on current rising issues. Sometimes instead of inventing a new solution, we just have to take a step back.

What's next for PastPractices

We hope to include more philosophers in the future to broaden user exposure, and we also hope to include a system where users can decide which path they would like to go down (e.g. "Finding oneself" and "Becoming Who You Want To Be").