#WinnerSeries Jim the Workout Assistant
HackDavis is the first major collegiate Hackathon at UC Davis completely run by students. We’re providing a platform to bring together the most talented students in California to address the world’s most pressing social issues.
This week for our #WinnerSeries we bring to you Kevin Chan and Victor Tram, winners of the Best Use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) award! Inspired by their own experiences, Jim the Workout Assistant (a clever play on the word “gym”) was created to help anyone looking for a personalized workout plan to target specific areas of your body. Scroll down to learn more about their experience at Hackdavis 2018!
What school are you from? What year?
Kevin: “I am a 3rd year student at Cosumnes River College and Victor is a Junior at Sacramento State.”
What was your project?
Kevin: “Our project was Jim the Workout Assisant, a workout planning tool built for any Amazon Alexa enabled device. After calling the right commands to Alexa, the tool would tailor a set of exercises for a previously specified targeted body area workout!”
What tools did you use in creating your project?
Kevin: “The Amazon Alexa skill was built first through the Amazon Developer Console to initialize and configure the skill. Further refining and the core of functionality was built in AWS Lambda. There, the function code was written in JavaScript utilizing Node.js framework and the Alexa Skills Kit.”
What was your inspiration behind this product?
Kevin: “The inspiration behind this project came from my active lifestyle. I frequently go to the gym and I always meet some people who are fairly new to fitness or weight lifting that ask what my workout routines are. A common issue I’ve noticed with newcomers is that they often struggle to know what exercises to do and what areas of the body these exercises target. This got me to come up with an idea of a tool that will automatically plan one’s workout, making going to the gym that much easier. The idea to create this tool as an Amazon Alexa skill came from the fact that I just picked up an Amazon Echo a few weeks prior to the hackathon.”
How did the theme of “coding for social good” shape your hackathon experience?
Kevin: “I think having a theme for the hackathon helped us narrow down project ideas. There were many ideas (some good, many bad) that we thought of for our project but having a theme definitely made it easier to sort through which idea was actually worth pursuing.”
What was your favorite part of HackDavis?
Kevin: “My favorite part of HackDavis was the definitely the late night snacks. Since a lot of people left the area and some were sleeping, there were no lines for the snacks and a lot to go around. (Plus who won’t like boba at like 1 in the morning?)”
Do you have any advice to hackathon newcomers?
Kevin: “Don’t stress out about the time too much. Just see how far you can get in the time given rather than try to force yourself to fit everything in the time window.”
Tell us a fun fact about your group!
Kevin: “The graphic we used that’s posted on the DevPost was made using SnapChat!”
Try out Jim the Workout Assistant at https://devpost.com/software/jim-the-workout-assistant!
