Mental health came into the spotlight of public healthcare after the pandemic. In that vein, we wanted to focus that spotlight even more on younger generations. During COVID, younger generations found themselves increasingly attached to social media in unhealthy proportions, which has led to a generation-wide crisis of feelings such as anxiety and depression.
With our mobile journaling app designed for younger generations, we aim to counteract these negative impacts, in an effort to encourage children to learn basic self-care techniques earlier in life. While social media can make children hyperaware of their social presence, this app works to build a stronger sense of self through active, yet basic reflection. With a target audience of children from ages 6-12, the application is designed to be engaging through XP points and levels to incentivize consistent journaling habits.
Our ultimate mission is to help establish self-care habits at a foundational age for youth.
Journaling has never been this easy. This sleek interface prompts users with simple yet interesting questions, reducing the mental entry barrier commonly associated with picking up journaling. After gauging the user's overall mood by presenting a choice between sad, neutral, or happy, the app personalizes questions to suit their mood, in a manner that is both seamless and satisfying. After the user responds to the prompt to their desired amount, they simply log the entry. What follows is positive reinforcement through encouraging statistics, such as an increase in their journaling streak or XP points
Primarily utilizing React.js framework and by extension the JavaScript language, our app was mainly built in the mobile cross-platform development interface Expo Go. Expo Go allowed for our team to visualize live changes to our coding environment in either an Android or IOS platform, enabling quick workflow and accelerating the pace at which our project was completed. In addition to JavaScript, the techniques used for styling the visual components of the app were drawn from other web development languages such as CSS and HTML.
Prior to coding the program, our team came together to whiteboard our primary objectives and development cycle. By doing this, we were able to determine which interface and coding language would be best suited for our needs. We chose React.js over its competitor Swift to maximize cross-platform capability by allowing both Android and IOS audiences to reap the benefits of our application.
Before beginning to work on coding our app, we collectively decided that we wanted to use a language we were all relatively less proficient at in order to become more well-rounded as programmers for the future. While having a base in object-oriented programming languages such as Java proved beneficial when using Javascript, the syntax of the language was unfamiliar enough that implementing our primary objectives initially proved to be quite a challenge.
In the initial stages of brainstorming, our excitement for our idea had us producing ideas upon ideas for what the final product of this app could look like. As we began mapping out our development plan, the reality of the strict 24-hour limit made clear that we would be forced to pick and choose from what aspects of the application were most essential to the user.
Another source of difficulty came in the form of UI design, where we took special care to consider how to make the front end of our app as conducive to our audience as possible. While programming skills are a vital component of building a user-based application, some problem requires the use of perspective, an often overlooked aspect of program design. For example, it proved more difficult than expected to come up with questions to ask a child when they were sad that were not too direct, but also gently prodded introspection.
Firstly, this is our first hackathon for all members of the group. We are proud to submit a finished product that represents the lofty goals we set out to accomplish over the course of 24 hours. We are even more proud knowing that our idea is so important to us, that we can all see ourselves continuing our work on this after the hackathon.
We are proud of the project itself. We believe as a team that computer programming is best used as a tool to empower others, and we hope our project can demonstrate that belief.
We were able to learn a great deal about a language we were not proficient in previously. Using JavaScript during the hackathon has improved our skills in web-based and mobile app development. We set out for a challenge, and thankfully we not only met but exceeded our own expectations.
We hope to integrate more features including an online pet mascot, a virtual coin-based reward system that can be used to purchase in-game customizations for said mascot, and other popular gaming design strategies before hopefully releasing the app on the App Store.
javascript, react native, css, html https://snack.expo.dev/@yousufqari/c8a195