## Inspiration

Internet Addiction, while not yet codified within a psychological framework, is growing both in prevalence as a potentially problematic condition with many parallels to existing recognized disorders. How much time do you spend on your phone a day? On your laptop? Using the internet? What fraction of that time is used doing things that are actually productive? Over the past years, there is seen to be a stronger and stronger link between an increasing online presence and a deteriorating mental health. We spend more time online than we do taking care of ourselves and our mental/emotional wellbeing.

However, people are becoming more aware of their own mental health, more open to sharing their struggles and dealing with them. However the distractions of social media, games, and scrolling are constantly undermining our efforts. Even with an understanding of the harmful nature of these technologies, we still find it so difficult to take our attention away from them. Much of the media we consume online is built to be addicting, to hook us in. How can we pull ourselves away from these distractions in a way that doesn’t feel punishing?

## What it does

Presents an audio visual stimulation that allows the user to become more aware of their “mind space”
Lo fi audio and slow moving figures
A timer that resets everytime keyboard or mouse is moved
Program awards the player a new plant for every time the timer comes to an end

## How we built it

UI/UX design using sigma
Frontend using HTML, JS, and CSS
AWS Amplify for deploying our webapp
Github for version control

## Challenges we ran into

Initially wanted to use react.js and develop our server backend ourselves but since we are inexperienced, we had to scale back our goals.
Team consisted mostly of people with backend experience, it was difficult to convert to front-end.
Furthermore, Most of our members were participating in their first hackathon.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud of learning how to work together as a team, and manage projects in github for the first time. We're proud of having an end product, even though it didn't fully meet our expectations. We're happy to have this experience, and can't wait to participate in more hackathons in the future.

## What we learned

We developed a lot of web development skills, specifically with javascript, as most of our member have never used it in the past. We also learned a lot about AWS. We're all very excited about how we can leverage AWS to develop more serverless web applications in the future.

## What's next for Mind-Space

We want to develop Mind-Space to play more like an idle game, where the user can choose their choice of relaxing music, or guided meditation. As the player spends more time in their space, different plants will grow, some animals will be introduced, and eventually what started as just one sprout will become a whole living ecosystem. We want to add social features, where players can add friends and visit each other's Mind-Space, leveraging AWS Lambda and MongoDB to achieve this.
## Inspiration

Mental Health Alphabet was inspired by the impact the pandemic has on the population. Since it is the first pandemic in tens of years, everyone is trying to adapt to the new environment and ways of doing. For example, College and University students had to transition from in-person classes to online classes. Going from walking on school grounds everyday to staring at computer screens all day, we know for a fact that that transition had a negative impact on the students’ mental health. We decided to create this project to raise awareness on mental health.

## What it does

Mental Health Alphabet is a web application that allows people to educate themselves about different types of mental health conditions. We made it in a fun interactive way to make people feel comfortable learning about that subject. Mental Health Alphabet provides resources from healthcare professionals for people in need, such as helplines and links to other websites. We also included a quiz that allows people to estimate their mental wellbeing.

## How we built it

We built Mental Health Alphabet using HTML, CSS, Javascript and Python (Flask). We used Figma to get a rough draft of the layout of our webpage and used Procreate to draw images by hand. Throughout the process, we were actively communicating while live coding using Live Share.

## Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into while creating our project was certainly our lack of coding skills. Only one person from our team had major knowledge about HTML/CSS and Javascript. The other three members only knew Python and a little bit of Java. Because of that, the majority of the team had to learn new programming languages in a span of 36 hours.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

McHacks is three of our members’ first hackathon. We were constantly putting ourselves out of our comfort zone by coding in a language that we were unfamiliar with. Collaborating and dividing tasks were productive because each member was working on a development area that they were more skilled in. After finishing the easy part, it was time to learn how to code in a new language that three other students rarely used before. We were disoriented, however we got adapted to the new language very quickly and were able to write many lines of codes. With that, we are all proud of our first hackathon project.

## What we learned

We have learned a lot about mental health conditions and stumbled upon very interesting information that we didn’t know prior to the hackathon, such as learning what kleptomania is. Since we had members who were fairly new to programming, as a team, we learned a lot about new web development languages. We also got familiarized with the connection between front-end and backend. This event allowed us to discover the use of more advanced features like integrating our code with frameworks and gave us a good insight on what we can achieve through coding.

## What's next for Mental Health Alphabet

Mental Health Alphabet has a great future ahead. We plan on adding more words to our dictionary and more defined quizzes to make our website even more educative and interactive.
## Inspiration

(<http://televisedrevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/mr_robot.jpg>)

If you watch Mr. Robot, then you know that the main character, Elliot, deals with some pretty serious mental health issues. One of his therapeutic techniques is to write his thoughts on a private journal. They're great... they get your feelings out, and acts as a point of reference to look back to in the future.

We took the best parts of what makes a diary/journal great, and made it just a little bit better - with Indico. In short, we help track your mental health similar to how FitBit tracks your physical health. By writing journal entries on our app, we automagically parse through the journal entries, record your emotional state at that point in time, and keep an archive of the post to aggregate a clear mental profile.

## What it does

This is a FitBit for your brain. As you record entries about your live in the private journal, the app anonymously sends the data to Indico and parses for personality, emotional state, keywords, and overall sentiment. It requires 0 effort on the user's part, and over time, we can generate an accurate picture of your overall mental state.

The posts automatically embeds the strongest emotional state from each post so you can easily find / read posts that evoke a certain feeling (joy, sadness, anger, fear, surprise). We also have a analytics dashboard that further analyzes the person's longterm emotional state.

We believe being cognizant of one self's own mental health is much harder, and just as important as their physical health. A long term view of their emotional state can help the user detect sudden changes in the baseline, or seek out help & support long before the situation becomes dire.

## How we built it

The backend is built on a simple Express server on top of Node.js. We chose React and Redux for the client, due to its strong unidirectional data flow capabilities, as well as the component based architecture (we're big fans of css-modules). Additionally, the strong suite of redux middlewares such as sagas (for side-effects), ImmutableJS, and reselect, helped us scaffold out a solid, stable application in just one day.

## Challenges we ran into

Functional programming is hard. It doesn't have any of the magic that two-way data-binding frameworks come with, such as MeteorJS or AngularJS. Of course, we made the decision to use React/Redux being aware of this. When you're hacking away - code can become messy. Functional programming can at least prevent some common mistakes that often make a hackathon project completely unusable post-hackathon.

Another challenge was the persistance layer for our application. Originally, we wanted to use MongoDB - due to our familiarity with the process of setup. However, to speed things up, we decided to use Firebase. In hindsight, it may have cause us more trouble - since none of us ever used Firebase before. However, learning is always part of the process and we're very glad to have learned even the prototyping basics of Firebase.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

* Fully Persistant Data with Firebase
* A REAL, WORKING app (not a mockup, or just the UI build), we were able to have CRUD fully working, as well as the logic for processing the various data charts in analytics.
* A sweet UI with some snazzy animations
* Being able to do all this while having a TON of fun.

## What we learned

* Indico is actually really cool and easy to use (not just trying to win points here). Albeit it's not always 100% accurate, but building something like this without Indico would be extremely difficult, and similar apis I've tried is not close to being as easy to integrate.
* React, Redux, Node. A few members of the team learned the expansive stack in just a few days. They're not experts by any means, but they definitely were able to grasp concepts very fast due to the fact that we didn't stop pushing code to Github.

## What's next for Reflect: Journal + Indico to track your Mental Health

Our goal is to make the backend algorithms a bit more rigorous, add a simple authentication algorithm, and to launch this app, consumer facing. We think there's a lot of potential in this app, and there's very little (actually, no one that we could find) competition in this space.