Quizmodoro

Inspiration

Our inspiration for Quizmodoro came from popular study techniques like the Pomodoro Technique and immediate feedback, but with a twist. To add a dash of 'productive annoyance' by disrupting our beloved distractions. Imagine a tool that not only manages your study time but even challenges you to prove what you've learned – or else face the ultimate inconvenience: a locked device. This concept emerged from recognizing a gap in traditional Pomodoro applications – they excel in organising study time but fall short in measuring its effectiveness. In today's world, where students are inseparably attached to their phones, what could be more motivating (and admittedly, a bit irksome) than a phone lockout for getting a quiz answer wrong?

What it does

Quizmodoro combines the functionality of a Pomodoro timer with a quiz generator. Students can set a study duration for their pomodoro session. After the session, theStudents can tailor their study sessions, and upon completion, they're are prompted to input their learning materials. The app then generates a set of unique quiz questions to test their understanding. If the student fails the quiz, the app locks them out of their phone for an hour – so that they can continue studying!

How we built it

We developed Quizmodoro using Kotlin. Due to the security restrictions of iOS that prevent us from locking the phone, we found a workaround for Android, allowing us to implement this unique feature.

We also integrated Google AI Studio (Gemini) API to read student’s learning materials and then generate a set of quiz questions based on their learning materials so as to ensure that the quiz is tailored to what they have learnt.

Challenges we ran into

Having no prior experience with Kotlin, it was definitely a challenge for the team to work with an unfamiliar language on top of doing something outside our comfort zone which is developing for android.

Since all of us were working asynchronously, we had to use version control which ended up being more challenging than we expected to coordinate our efforts due to differing experience between members. Some of our members were more well versed in version control due to having more experience, whereas some members had lesser experience at all. It led to some of our files being lost in translation when pushing and pulling our code, this had cost us some valuable time to work on our project.

We also ran into some issues that led to us working around existing features of android development. Initially, we had implemented the device lock feature to lock the entire phone upon failure of the quiz. However, this led to the user being unable to see the lock screen. We felt that this is an inadequate solution as it resulted in poor user experience, since the user would not even be able to see the remaining time that their phone will be locked for. A workaround we came up with was to force the user to remain on the application through an overlay, which displays over other applications, improving user experience while retaining the key feature that we wanted.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of coming up with a solution to a problem that all of us resonated with. Despite our technical naivety, we pushed through and managed to deliver a working final product within such a short amount of time despite facing numerous challenges. Some of our team members were particularly satisfied as they came up with a product with meaningful functionality that could be highly applicable to our daily lives.

What we learned

Nobody on our team had prior experience with android app development, the opportunity to participate in Hack & Roll encourages us to think unconventionally, inspiring us to devise applications that prioritise creativity over profitability or conventional problem-solving. This was also the team’s first time taking part in a 24 hour on-site hackathon. This meant that we had to be flexible and focused through this 24 hour window so that we can deliver the best end product within our means. Our experience with brainstorming and subsequently developing Quizmodoro was truly a memorable one.

What's next for Quizmodoro

Moving forward, we believe that technologies such as Google Gemini’s Large Language Models will become more ubiquitous. AI has already been incorporated in productivity apps such as notion. There is huge potential in terms of the scalability of such a tool like Quizmodoro to be used for learning. By adding features like tracking study progress, offering customizable quiz difficulty levels, and incorporating social elements to motivate students further. It could become the leading productivity app if it can leverage on burgeoning technologies before others.

Furthermore, we would also like to implement a post-quiz history feature, akin to Anki-style or AI-powered flashcards, that offers the advantage of applying spaced repetition learning, aligning with the format of short quizzes. This feature aims to compile and organise all incorrect quiz answers for effective reinforcement and retention. This can be especially useful for medical or law students which requires rote memorisation.

Built With

• geminiai
• kotlin
• xml