Lynbrook’s First Hackathon!

Just attended Lynbrook’s first ever Hackathon, VikeHacks. And won first place!


It was a lot of fun and I worked with one of my best friends, Marilyn to create “Destress,” an app to help you relax and unwind. Our main goal was to create a lot of different features so that we’d learn something new with every feature we created.


 Breathing: My favorite feature is the “Breathing” one, where we created a catalog of various breathing exercises to help calm you down. We learned about different types of layouts and ways to implement gifs in Android studio.





Feelings: Since the Hackathon was sponsored by IBM’s Bluemix Watson project, we wanted to try and use the Speech-to-Text and Tonal Analysis processes provided by them in our “Feelings” portion of the app. We wanted the allow the user to say something and have the app save a tone, or emotion for that statement. Then, if the app is used regularly, over time the user could see how their tone has changed. Unfortunately, since neither of us had ever used such a complex API before, we weren’t able to successfully implement this section. We still learned a lot about APIs and SDKs though!

Messages: In the end, we still pulled through in using a different API to generate a happy message every 24 hours for the “Messages” feature of the app.

Notifications: And we learned about launch activities when we created the “Notifications” features which launches to the Settings app on the user’s phone so they can manage their notifications.

Sounds: Lastly, the “Sounds” portion creates calming sounds to relax the user.

I’m really proud of our work and Marilyn and I tied with another team for 1st place!

(Marilyn had to leave before they announced winners--wish she was up there wish me!)

We both won an Amazon Echo Dot.




I’m super excited to start using it and the best part is, Amazon even has an API for Alexa, so I can continue coding and experiment using it!


Check out the project on DevPost here: https://devpost.com/software/destress-unexwy


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Also! Lynbrook wrote an article about it which you can see here:
https://lhsepic.com/631/news/lynbrook-hosts-first-ever-hackathon/




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