LifeBoat is an android application that helps you learn a new skill daily, with short tutorials that teach you skills you should know, so you can be prepared for whatever life throws at you- from a flat tyre to a medical emergency.
Find a video explanation here and check out the documentation for more info!
The theme for the hackathon is “Social Good”, so we thought about what we could do to make a difference in the lives of people around us. Most of the ideas we came up with had already been done in one way or another. Then we came up with something that we realized we have always needed, and decided to create LifeBoat.
School is the basis of education but what we are not really taught in school are some basic life skills such as changing a tyre, basic self defense moves, how to perform CPR, etc. Such knowledge is however very important for each individual to have. In a constantly changing environment, having life skills is an essential part of being able to meet the challenges of everyday life. The ability to self-manage is very important. LifeBoat provides a collection of tutorials to learn these skills.
LifeBoat is a mobile application that helps you learn a new, useful and essential life skill everyday.
It has multiple features-
- A range of essential tutorials to learn from and be prepared
- A new tutorial presented to you daily
- Push notifications to remind you to learn something new
- A list of all tutorials for easy access
- A video at the end of every tutorial for visual demonstration
None of us had ever built an app before, so this experience was very new to us. We learnt so much and using a low code development platform, we got a taste of what development is all about! We had to think on our feet and collaborate with each other to finish our end product - LifeBoat.
LifeBoat is an Android mobile application. We have used Backendless, a no-code development platform to create it. Our application uses a Data API in the backend, which stores all the tutorials in the form of objects in a relational database table. Information is retrieved by simple SQL type queries from the backend.
We ran into a lot of problems while trying to automate the process of generating an unseen tutorial everytime the user asked for one. We experimented with databases and cache, and settled on cache. Each data structure had its own set of challenges in manipulating it.
We are proud of the app we put together in a short span of three days, especially since all of us are new to mobile app development. We are thrilled at the way we distributed tasks for better time management, but still came together as a team to cross any hurdles we encountered. Most of all, we are proud of the sheer amount of learning we did over the past three days.
We learned how to use various APIs like messaging, data APIs and leanred how to work with cache as well.
The future scope of this project is to
- Include as many tutorials as possible in this application and automatically suggest relevant tutorials to the users to enrich their learning experience.
- Automatically retrieve data from the internet to create tutorials relevant to the user.
- Reward the users who are dedicated towards learning new things using a points system.