Branch Out

App run through
Development phase

Inspiration

Our inspiration for this project came from “Forest: Focus for Productivity” when our group was researching existing productivity software currently in the market. While discussing how we can produce something similar where the user's productivity is what grows the tree/forest, one of our members suggested that instead of productivity, what if the user's interaction with others is what grew the tree. By incentivizing the user to meet new people, we believed that it would promote the well-being of the individual.

What it does

It encourages users to take more photos with their loved ones and expand their tree of connections, making the goal of meeting new people.

How we built it

We decided to create an Android application as opposed to a desktop application since the app required the user to take photos and upload them. Flutter seemed to be a good choice to build the app in, and we decided to learn the basics of Flutter before starting to code. We used VSCode, Flutter, and Android Studio to emulate a phone in order to test-run our app.

Challenges we ran into

None of us have had much practice making art, so we had trouble creating the GUI of the app in terms of visual features. We struggled to learn Flutter, Android Studio, and Dart within 24 hours. We struggled to set up and integrate Android Studio with Flutter and VS Code. We struggled with utilizing data structures in order to overlay leaves on the tree.