FitForm League was built by three students in grade eight at Trưng Vương Secondary School in Hanoi, with help from one teacher. None of them had written a web application before.
They started with a simple question: why do so many classmates sit all day? The first idea was a poster campaign. They dropped it after a week, because posters tell people what to do and nobody checks whether anything changes.
The second idea became the product. If a camera can see your body, a computer can count your squats; if it can count, it can score; and if it can score, a class can play. The first version counted badly, rewarded shaking the tablet and crashed on old devices. Each of those problems took weeks to fix.
What they learned is not mainly about code. It is that a small team can finish something real if the idea is narrow enough: one movement, one camera, one class, then two. They also learned to write things down, because the three of them will leave grade nine and somebody else will have to run it.
The project is free, the code is public, and any school can copy it. That was the plan from the first week.
Vocabulary in this text
- enough /ɪˈnʌf/ — as much as you need