4Ever

Inspiration

We are a group of rising seniors preparing for the college process. This topic especially connected with us because we are all First Generation Low-Income students. We all don’t know what to expect when it comes to actually attending college. Being first in the family means our parents are terrified while we’re confused. They fear us feeling lonely while learning how to navigate this new environment. We wanted to find a way to help us navigate our anticipated homesickness while connecting us with other students in the same position.

What it does

With this in mind, we decided to create 4ever. It is an app that addresses our loneliness and confusion. 4ever is an app for students with their families. After you make an account, you can share your unique code to connect with family and friends. When you log in to 4ever, you will see a randomly generated prompt asking you a random question about your day. It may ask you to share a photo of the nature around you or share a picture of your current obsession. If sharing a photo doesn’t interest you, you could record a video or answer it as text. The files you and your family share will be put on the gallery page only you can see. There is also a “Tips” page with a dedicated family and student page. The student section of tips comes from students nationwide who share tips that have helped them throughout their four years. It may tell you which subscriptions give student discounts, how to master a perfect essay, receive free textbooks, and other tips to master the school year. You can read encouraging messages, heartfelt words, and advice in the family section. All users are encouraged to share messages, with the option of being available to all users or their families.

How we built it

We built it by first saying some ideas about what we anticipate needing for our personal college process. We realized the common trend we discussed was fear of homesickness and confusion at college. We spent Friday researching if this was common for all First Generation low-income students. 40.3% of first-generation students experienced clinically significant symptoms of major depressive disorder (MDD), and 44.6% experienced clinically significant symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD)—figures higher than national averages, all due to the stress of being placed in a new environment without adequate support. Once we realized the severity of the problem, we created the app name. Saturday, we worked on UX Design and learned frontend code. An app like this is far more advanced than our knowledge, so we wanted to spend time wireframing it on Figma to have a clear image of how our app should look and run. After finishing our wireframe, we learned JS, CSS, and HTML. Sunday, we coded it as much as we could, but we weren’t able to finish it, but we plan to finish the app in the future.

Challenges we ran into

Of course, with any project, we had a lot of challenges. We first had some difficulty deciding on a unique project. We wanted our app to be something fresh, but we were able to overcome it by expressing our similar feelings and experiences. Once the topic was decided on, we realized we needed to Prototype and design our app. We ran into another challenge, navigating Figma. It was a new application for most of us, so there was a lot of Youtube watching. Luckily, we could preserve and finish, providing us time to learn more code. While coding, we ran into many bugs, but we realized we couldn’t fully create our project due to our lack of knowledge with backend. We plan to learn backend to finish and perfect our app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we could produce a project, considering this was our first hackathon. Before starting this project, we doubted our capability, believing that the time needed to be longer to produce a viable project. We surprised ourselves by producing an aesthetically pleasing wireframe, learning a new coding language, and we coded a portion of our idea.

What we learned

We learned not to doubt ourselves and to have some confidence in our coding capabilities. We gained knowledge about Figma, which allowed us to go into coding with an obvious idea of how our app should flow and function. We also learned how to code and debug.

What's next for 4ever

The next step for 4ever is to finish the app. Once our first version is done, we plan to ensure that 4ever is more accessible for all students. We want an option where the picture prompts and tips are read aloud for visually impaired people. After making our app accessible, we will collaborate with organizations to provide our users with better resources for their college years. 4ever is perfect for the four years of college.