Like many other students, we found online learning a difficult adjustment, especially in staying motivated and productive. As we shared our experiences with each other, one of our team members had a younger cousin in elementary school who had an even tougher time going to school virtually. From keeping up with class assignments to communicating with the teacher or peers, young students have immense trouble adapting to learning during the pandemic. Thus, we created StudyBears to be a fun, engaging way for students to stay productive and connected to their classmates, teachers, and assignments. As both an organized work and collaborative platform, StudyBears wants to take the stress off of online school and have children enjoy learning, even adding features, such as the Store and Closet, to make the app entertaining for students. It’s important for elementary school students, at their developmental age, to stay excited for school and connected to their peers. We believe that even after the pandemic, StudyBears will still be an impactful platform, one that facilitates productive studying and enjoyable learning. Our ultimate vision is to highlight education as essential to our lives and necessary to make us better people, no matter the age. Whether it’s creating a fun way for students to feel enthusiastic about their homework or providing a space to stay focused (especially during this chaotic time), StudyBears will continue to encourage people to become the best version of themselves through connection and productivity.

As beginner hackers (some of us who had never coded before), we knew that HackSC would be both a challenge and an incredible learning opportunity for us. Especially tackling this hackathon virtually, we learned that scheduling our time and delegating tasks was key to our success in completing our project. Strong communication and work transparency allowed us to understand what each person was working on and what also allowed us to support each other throughout the weekend. Especially for the half of the team who had recently learned how to use Swift and Firebase, HackSC was our first chance to actually create a project and collaborate with others. We are happy to share that our team learned so much about coding, design, and teamwork from this experience.

Our team implemented an engineering design thinking process in order to build StudyBears. Initially, we brainstormed ideas for an application that could be helpful and relevant during the pandemic. Eventually, we decided to tackle a problem that was personal to our own team members, relatives, and many more: the lack of engagement and connection between groups within online learning. We realized that for elementary students, especially, COVID-19 had changed their understanding and ability to thrive academically, and we wanted to help them. Before we began coding the front and backends of our application, we developed various concept drawings and artboard vision boards to help us get a clear design idea as well as allow us to optimize the UI/UX while incorporating the software functions we deemed absolute. These concepts and artboards were then programmed in our Xcode Project using Swift, eventually building out the UI of our StudyBears app. Additionally, we wanted to implement a real-time back end database that StudyBears would use. We decided upon using Google Cloud Firebase’s real-time database and authentication systems as a means of storing pertinent user data and analytics to be utilized throughout our application. Through their systems, we furthered the user experience, creating an efficient user-data pipeline connecting all aspects of our app. Firebase’s SDKs were then used to integrate the database with our Swift UI code, allowing the application to respond to user inputs in real time. Github was utilized as our means of version control; ensuring a parallel work process and smooth integration of workflows.

With a fully functional prototype, we hope to be able to implement more machine learning algorithms to better assist teachers and students alike in terms of providing statistical data and knowledge when it comes to learning. We hope to be able to change the culture of learning, powering and innovating towards a more technological and bearific approach.