Structify

HOMESCREEN
PREFERENCE GUIDE
MANDATORY COMMITMENTS
OPTIONAL COMMITMENTS
EXAMPLE RETURNED CALENDAR

Education Track

Inspiration

We ourselves struggle with the paradox of having too much free time and too little structure in college. The American Psychology Association has stated that too much free time results in lower overall wellbeing. We wanted there to be an app/website that could create your schedule for you to not only save time but use it more efficiently as well. For students with and without ADHD, having a rigid day increases productivity, happiness, and efficiency.

What it does

We sought to alleviate college student's mental health by giving them a structured day. Users enter their commitments, like classes and club meetings and those go in at specific scheduled times. Then, the user inputs anything else they want to get done that week, like practice coding, exercise play tennis, and Structify builds a schedule for them so that they do not have to be crippled with too much free time.

How we built it

We created the front end website with React. We imported a couple components we found off of the Internet to handle the calendar and date/time picking features. The user input is sent to our Python / Flask API, which takes the data and fits the optional commitments around the mandatory commitments. The algorithm tries to place the events as close to 3 pm as possible, and it returns the data back to the front end, which then places all of the events in the schedule.

Challenges we ran into

Perhaps the biggest challenge we faced was creating an algorithm that would insert events into free time in a reasonable way. We had to decide whether to randomly place a user's optional commitments randomly into their schedule or try to find a weighting system to return the highest weighted schedule. We also ran into trouble connecting our back end to our front end because we had to decide what form the data would be in when it's sent to and from the Flask server.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting to go through the entire creative process, from brainstorming and pitching ideas to each other, and then actually taking our ideas and putting them into application. This was our first time building a legitimate product in a group, so we had to work through getting everyone on the same page and turning our ideas into code.

What we learned

None of us were skilled in web design before today, and this project forced us to learn. Additionally, it was interesting to actually apply many of the skills that we learn in class. We learned the intricacies of connecting the front end to the back end and everything in between.

What's next for Structify

We plan to add the ability to share your schedule and request shared events with your friends. Structify can modify both schedules to find time for you to collaborate. We also want to leverage notification data to create machine learning models that better make user’s schedules in a way where the most activities are completed. For example, if a user responds to a notification that they did not complete their morning workout, Structify would learn to place their next workout later in the day.