Let's be real. 2020 has not been the best year. 2020 is the definition of uncertainty, and uncertainty can definitely be scary. We were inspired by the lack of self-care that is practiced in today's society, especially during this pandemic, which can be extremely straining—mentally, emotionally, and physically. During these times, self-care is more important than ever. It helps us stay in touch with ourselves and embrace the uncertainty in our world. In fact, it can take as little as 5 minutes to uplift your mind and body. Our new web app, Uplift combats that by giving a survival guide for stressful and unmotivating days.

Our primary feature is the self-care activity generator—one that is fast, flexible, and efficient. Users can choose the amount of time they have based on time intervals then if they’d like an activity indoors, outdoors, or either. Based on those two user inputs, the web app will output an activity for the user to complete. If the user isn’t interested, they can retry, either with the same settings or different.

If the user wants to pick for themselves, they can visit the “types of self-care” section, where Uplift provides eight activities for four types of self-care: emotional, physical, mental, and social. Additionally, there are embedded videos for the user to access easily, whether it’s workout videos or peaceful music.

We built Uplift using HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, jQuery, and Figma.

We are really proud of our purpose, our team, and our design. The idea: From initiating the idea to the MVP, we are extremely proud of our product and its features. Functionality: We were able to create a scrollable user experience with jQuery and also create an activity-generator with JavaScript. Tools: In an age where everybody sticks to popular frameworks, we chose to exhibit our HTML, CSS, and vanilla JS skills and build our app purely based on that. Teamwork: We learned how to collaborate well according to each of our strengths and were able to deploy a functional web app important for self-care in 2020 and beyond.

We learned how important UX is and how to create our uplift activity generator with JavaScript. Our unique feature is the activity generator, and we learned about how to extract user input and use it to output an activity catered to that certain user. With help from mentors and TTNY workshops, we also learned how to code new features such as JavaScript randomization and anchor scrolling functions. We also learned how to use jQuery, as this was our first time using it.

Another feature we hope to add is our mood journal to track the user's emotional state, along with a self-care day tracker. Using the mood journal, the user would be able to track the emotions they felt at the time and what self-care activity helped you relieve it. The self-care day tracker would keep track of all the days the user practiced self-care and remind them to practice self-care once in a while. Uplift will help teens uplift their mood and improve their day to day life. We're also looking to expand toward user input and community building, where users can input their favorite self-care activities to add to the array of self-care activities!