College students like ourselves face many challenges and difficulties while attending. Two common issues we find students face are making friends and taking care of their health. For many students, it can be daunting to meet new people and many become isolated. Also, during the semester, we are often too busy with deadlines and assignments so we neglect to incorporate any physical activity into our daily schedule. This results in being over or underweight which leads to self-esteem and mental health issues. We wanted to create an application that would break our habits and develop beneficial ones instead.
Bruin Gains is intended for students of Sheridan College to find workout partners in an intuitive and elegant application. It proposes a solution to the problem of meeting new people by making it easy to connect with others sharing similar interests to you. The application will display a number of other individuals you can befriend. To help you, they will have additional information such as the program faculty they are in and their fitness level so that you have common interests with them and kick start your fitness journey. Once you become friends with another person on the app, you can easily organize workout sessions with them. Your gym partner can help you be more accountable during your workouts you reach your personal health goals.
The application begins with a home page where the user can easily see upcoming workout sessions that are scheduled as well as a quick list of some friends they have connected with. To find friends, there is a separate page that shows list of people that they can click on to initiate the friendship. Here, they can click on any user and see their profile. The user can also see all of the friends they have made on a separate page as well and click to start a chat or book a workout session. The chat feature helps each person to get to know each other and have a conversation outside of the gym. When they decide to work out, they can navigate to the "Create session" page by clicking on a person. Here they can select the details of the workout such as the date, time, duration, and type of workout. This application makes it extremely easy to find friends with similar interests and work out with others which are two major challenges college students face.
Bruin Gains was planned with Miro and designed using the software Adobe XD. The web application was built with React. CSS and Bootstrap were used to make the application elegant and aesthetically pleasing. GitHub allowed us to iteratively develop the application and we adopted the new "Live Share" feature in Visual Studio Code to allow us to code all together in real-time, similar to Peer Programming. Google Firebase Auth and Firestore was used to incorporate authentication and saving user information in our application. For the backend, we used a JSON server to enable rapid production given the time frame.
Initially, it was difficult to think of an idea but when looking at the theme for Hackville 2020 "Hacks for college students", we began to draw ideas from personal experiences. We all found that it was difficult initially to create friends and even in our third year, it has been difficult to get our daily physical activity in. That was when we knew we had to create a solution to those two problems and we believe we have achieved that. Another challenge was incorporating the use of Google Firebase Auth for the authentication and Google Firestore for storing user data, as we had some technical issues but thanks to our Peer Programming approach, we were able to overcome them. We also faced difficulty with getting the chat functionality to work. It was difficult to make our web application the exact same as our Adobe XD wireframe but in the time we had, we believe we were very close.
We are proud that we thought of and started the implementation of a new application that can help solve two big problems for new and existing college students. We believe that many students will benefit from this and will leave a positive impact on students' mental and physical health.
We are also proud that on our first project together, we were able to work together as a team to generate an idea, create an aesthetically pleasing prototype and have a working application in 36 hours.
We developed many skills such as communication, collaboration and leadership. We have also learned and reinforce skills in React, JavaScript, Google Firestore and Adobe XD.
Due to time constraints, we were not able to incorporate all of the features we would have liked to. Some include a leaderboard system to help bring a challenging aspect into the application and make it more motivating. We also would have liked to have a live tracker for the current workout session so that users can track notes and add or modify details to workouts to view later and improve.
Further ideas would be to definitely extend the application to other schools, not just Sheridan College. To help facilitate the creation of friendships, it would also be nice to include mini-games in the chat feature similar to "iMessage" mini-games.
Note: App demo was locally hosted