How a manually-tracked wellness challenge became a live, gamified leaderboard experience — built with Claude and VS Code, no wearables required.
The Disney Fitness Challenge leaderboard, live on the wellness platform.
As part of Disney's Total Wellbeing Week, our team ran an onsite physical fitness challenge combining dead hang/front raise/pull-up bar, plank hold, and wall-sit/squat hold stations. The client's global team wanted a live leaderboard to follow standings and celebrate participants — across locations, not just onsite.
Three moves let us skip wearables entirely and still ship a live, fair leaderboard.
An onsite admin recorded each participant's activity stats — dead hang/front raise/pull-up, plank hold, and wall-sit/squat hold times — against their name in an Excel sheet, avoiding wearable device costs entirely.
That Excel sheet was connected to a live leaderboard view on the platform, built using Claude and VS Code — no wearable SDKs, no new backend feature.
Display and ranking rules were written with Claude to keep the leaderboard fair, exciting, and free of confusing edge cases. See the rulebook below.
Two or more participants tied for first place both appear in the winner section, shown together with the winner card flip animation.
Ties at rank #2, #3, #4 or lower are simply reflected together in the leaderboard table — no special treatment needed.
Participants who repeat the activity are shown with their latest total time rather than their best, keeping the competition live and exciting rather than settled.
Participants missing any one of the three activities are excluded from the leaderboard, so only complete, comparable entries are ranked.
The result: a fully gamified, on-brand leaderboard experience, shipped without wearables or a new platform feature.
Reused an Excel-based manual capture process instead of procuring and integrating fitness wearables for every participant, avoiding hardware and multi-device-SDK costs entirely.
No native activity-tracking feature existed on the platform — the leaderboard was stood up with Claude and VS Code against a live spreadsheet instead of a new backend build.
Custom logic for shared ranks, the winner-flip animation, and completion gating meant standings reflected the challenge accurately, not just raw sheet order.
Disney's global wellbeing team could follow live, gender-split standings for the Bangalore challenge — turning a single-office activity into something the wider team could watch.
Together, this let the challenge run as a fully gamified, branded experience — winner card, animated flips, ranked table — without asking the client to pay for wearable infrastructure or waiting on a new platform feature to be engineered.