Hackathon · AUHack · April 2017
Number What: a clock for people with dyscalculia
Number What is a watch face for people who struggle to read an ordinary clock. We built it over a weekend at AUHack 2017 together with Katrine, who has dyscalculia herself. I did the programming, and the watch face exists for Pebble, Android and Wear OS.
The idea
The idea came from Katrine Kuhberg, our designer. She has dyscalculia and finds it hard to tell the time on an ordinary clock. She wanted a clock that made it easier for her and for others with the same challenge. That became Number What.
There were three of us on the team at AUHack 2017: Katrine Kuhberg as designer, and Michał Kapiczyński and me as developers.
How it works
The clock is shaped like a pie chart with two colours. Instead of minute numbers, one colour shows how much of the hour has passed and the other how much is left. You don’t have to read or calculate any numbers to see how far along you are.
There is only one number on the face: the hour. In the first half of the hour, from 0 to 29 minutes, the number sits in the part that has passed, and it is the hour we are in. In the second half, from 30 to 59 minutes, the number moves over to the part that is coming and shows the next hour. So you can see whether you are heading into or out of an hour without having to calculate.
Three platforms
We made the watch face for three platforms:
- Pebble in JavaScript with Rocky.js, for a Pebble Time 2.
- An Android widget that you can place on the home screen.
- A Wear OS watch face for Android smartwatches.
The Pebble version draws the face with a circle for the background and a circle sector for the minutes that have passed, and it redraws itself every minute. The Android part is written in Java in Android Studio, and we made both a widget and a real watch face so it can be used on both phone and watch.
The website
We also made a website for the project with a dynamic front page where you can read about the clock, get it and find the code. We built it with Bootstrap and the “New Age” template, and it lived at numberwhat.com. The site is no longer online, so the image here is recreated from the old code.
My contribution
I did the programming together with Michał. We wrote the Pebble watch face together, and on the Android part I took care of things like colours and font, so the two versions look the same. I also made the website.
Challenges and what we learned
We wrote ourselves that it was smooth sailing. We learned that smartwatches need a lot of charging time, and we learned how to pronounce dyscalculia, thanks to Google Translate.
The result
We didn’t win anything at AUHack 2017, but the project was mentioned by MLH, the organisation behind the hackathon league. We were proud to have made a digital clock that solves a problem people with dyscalculia face every day. We released the watch face source code freely on GitHub for everyone who struggles with time.