BunnyBolt: a mobile fitness app for youth

BunnyBolt is an interactive, maps-driven exercise game for youth. The app encourages physical activity by disguising in-app exercises with a youth-friendly storyline. Unlike games like Zombies, Run!, that lack a child-friendly fitness component, or games like FitQuestLite that cater too much towards children, BunnyBolt combines the fun of an interactive game with the practical concerns of workouts for an engaging app that is beneficial for all ages. Though our primary audience is youths who own smartphones, BunnyBolt's quick ten-minute workouts are appropriate for all ages. When developing this mobile application, our hope was to harness the elements of an engaging video game, and integrate it into an application that would encourage children to go outdoors and exercise. We used MIT App Inventor's block programming language to create the framework of our application. It is our hope that our game could become open source, and that it would inspire users to use MIT App Inventor to program their own episodes and continue the story. We believe that this sort of collaboration would not only improve the game, but also help the app grow in a way that encourages collaboration and engagement from its users. Furthermore, our app harnessed gamification principles to establish a reward system in the form of badge icons that users can collect. These additions in our game will be implemented with HTML5, Javascript, and Python and we will use Google App Engine to locally store data. We hope these aspects will give users an incentive to not only keep playing the game, but also to excel at it. In this paper, we will discuss the integration of location technologies like GPS with fitness related technologies, when considering the parameters of youth-targeted mobile app development. Our paper will also describe development goals, the structure of the game, and initial testing.