Movebreak

Movebreak

Movebreak was born out of the success of building Race Antarctica while at the British Antarctic Survey. The idea of encouraging friendly cross-team rivalries with the goal of promoting better fitness could be applied to numerous organizations.

After a few years of running Race Antarctica I decided to rebuild it as a multi-tenant application with the Django Framework and Django Rest Framework to improve the ease of development and introduce a better API data acessing. The main goal was to make the software more generic and easier to manage for the race organizer.

Movebreak is the web platform for the customizable races and was used to run races for the British Antarctic Survey and a few other external corporate partners. The idea of a race with balanced activities can be applied to many routes. For one client the race was a circle around all of their international offices. For another client it was around all of their remote sites in Africa.

Features

• Team and user dashboards - Easy to see progress and multiple ways to view your data. Graphs, calendars, and more.
• Easy data entry - Multiple ways to enter days. By distance, time or steps. Enter for team-mates who may be a little slow in data entry.
• Third-party integration - Import activities from FitBit and Strava.
• Customizable map - Races could be set to a custom distance and number of weeks. A custom route across the planet could be mapped out using waypoints.
• Customizable activities - Activities can be tailored to your own organization. In the British Antarctic Survey there were custom activities for people who lived and worked on ships and stations. For UK based clients, it might be that you want to include housework and yoga classes to balance against runners and cyclists.
• Easy administration - The day-to-day administration is easy for race organizers. Managing team enrolment and race distances is easily customisable.

Activities

Different organizations will have people of all levels of fitness. If you want a team based race to help encourage people to exercise you need to make sure the race is balanced to allow more casual exercisers to compete against lunch-time runners. The idea was to determine a series of ratios based on the calorific usage and relative time efficiency of the form of exercise. We wanted it to allow people who maybe weren’t as fit to go for an hour’s lunchtime walk and get similar credit to someone who has gone for a 20 minute run.

These example ratios are just a sub-set of the kinds of exercise that can be scaled.

Administration