Two ISU alumni in mechanical engineering, Jake Smith and Brian Capesius, have recently created an iPhone app to help with exercise accountability among students.

The new app, “ScoreWithIt”, was released on March 1 with hopes to make exercise more social by connecting students with friends.

“We made “ScoreWithIt” for people like us who want to be healthy or fit but knows how hard it is to get motivated and actually go workout,” Smith said. 

One of the biggest things Smith and Capesius realized when making the app was how social media first started off as a fun and then started becoming useful.

“You don’t have to be a gym rat to live a healthy lifestyle or be the best you. No matter what level you’re at, it’s all about getting better each day and that’s one thing we hope to accomplish with our app,” Capesius said.

The project first started off as a vague idea and desire to create an app useful to college students. The idea then metamorphosed itself into a user-friendly environment where students can keep track of their physical activity and share the journey with other users.

“When we started thinking about it, we thought it was going to be a really complicated app but then thought it needed to be as simple as possible,” Smith said.

The two have been working on this project for more than a year and met a few obstacles along the way. However, after being denied from Apple once, revisions went underway to make an app that Apple could not say no to.

“As the app evolves, we hope to add more,” Capesius said. “We don’t know exactly what we’ll add in the future but we hope to integrate more ideas from users and figure out what they want as the app becomes more popular.”

After downloading “ScoreWithIt,” users will come to a home screen where they can view other users’ news feeds and add their own content, much like a Twitter for fitness.

“We’re excited because it actually does work,” Smith said. “One cool feature that Brian came up with is keeping track of activity through hashtags. So if you played basketball that day, you can go to your profile and see your stats of how much you’ve played basketball over time.”

Their goal is that users will set a number of how much activity they wish to achieve each week and try to meet that goal.

Using hashtags will also set up users with other people to work out with who participate in the same activities.

Both Smith and Capesius are open to feedback from the ISU community to build an app that all will enjoy and continue to use.

The two hope to launch the app on android devices in the future.

“We definitely want it to become a national thing even though we’re just testing it out right now. We’re first going to focus on ISU students and get feedback,” Smith said.

To learn more about the app or give feedback, visit www.scorewithit.com or email [email protected] and [email protected]