During the Hack’n jill Hackathon, I, Phillip Quiza, Allie Riggs, and Jason Wright made an app that disciplines registered users to wake up at pre-determined times during the day by being social and playing games.

The app’s supposed to work like this: You sign up via Facebook on the bed battles website (by allowing the bed battles site have access to your Facebook email only – we honor the privacy of users). You then sign in (still using Facebook) and view your dashboard. Your bed battles dashboard will display some information about your bed battles reputation score (determined from how many previous bed battles you’ve won or lost). The dashboard will also contain information about how much a specific group  (could be a one-person group) of the community of bed battlers owe you for winning your bed battles (if they bet against you) or how much you owe others for winning their bed battles (if you bet against them) and an option to opt out of paying your friends in the bed battles community real money (we’d probably have an option that allows you to pay them in some other way – maybe by buying them ice cream or by just being nice). Using the dashboard, you can also schedule a time you wish to wake up and notify one of your friends that you’ve set up a specific time for both of you to wake up the next day and you want to challenge them to a game on bed battles. Before the challenge, you should be able to, on the bed battles site, negotiate a method of payment or reprisal (or both).

How does the bed battles game work? First, we plan to have more than one game available on bed battles and ideally a user should be able to select which game he/she wants to play with his/her challenger. For the Hack’n jill demo, we made a “shake hard and win” game. It’s a two player game that can be played on a smart phone. The game starts when an alarm (that’s synched with the bed battles site) rings. The user who shakes his/her phone more swiftly and vigorously wins the game. When the game is finished, the information about which user won the bed battle will be posted on the dashboard of both users and will be shared on the twitter and Facebook profile pages of both users. In this way, both users win anyways. They wake up at the same agreed time and play a game together so they get to leave for work (or school) early and also get hyped in the morning ready for work! The result of the challenge between the two users is posted on both Facebook and twitter. Subsequently, the reputation of the winner increases by a certain amount. On the other hand, the reputation of the loser decreases by the same amount. Plus, the loser is notified to pay the user some amount of money (if both money-bet). The “shake hard and win” game is one of many games that users can play. In fact, in the future, we plan to incorporate some multi-player retro games . We also briefly discussed including a “get-to-know-you-more” game that helps players get to know one another better by asking multiple choice questions about players.

Given the time constraints at the Hackathon (8 hours to code), we didn’t finish implementing all the features we wanted to but we’d continue to hone the bed battles
application. A quick listing of what API’s we used: We used the Facebook authentication API for authentication on our site; we used the Facebook Share API and Twitter API to share information about a challenge on the players’ Facebook and twitter profile pages; we used the venmo API to facilitate payments on our sites; and lastly, we used the twilio API to alert players via sms (in the future, we’d add voice sms/call) when the bed battle multi-player game is about to begin.

The Hack’n jill Hackathon was a lot of fun for me and my team! I hope to attend subsequent Hack’n jill Hackathons and I encourage you to do the same. Peace.