Inspiration
Welcome to BeBoiler, inspired by our members' favorite social media app, BeReal. With BeBoiler, students can engage in the many opportunities and events Purdue has to offer. BeBoiler encourages authenticity, connection, and engagement at Purdue. Through our app, our team hopes to support local businesses, showcase fundraising events, and support student organizations.
What it does
So how does BeBoiler actually work? Like BeReal, users will get a push notification during the day to take a photo. But, at BeBoiler, we like to go a little extra. This daily notification will be a mysterious "event of the day" announcement at Purdue, at which students are encouraged to attend or visit and take a photo. Using an API with Google Maps, our app can check off that they actually visited. With each photo, students will earn incentive points and students across campus will see photos of this event on their feed. From the beginning, BeBoiler is set up to immediately engage with the community and alert them about events across Purdue, regardless if they participate by taking a photo or if they simply scroll through their feed.
Talking about community, who exactly are we targeting? BeBoiler aims to connect the Purdue student body, student organizations, and local businesses in a fun and unique way! Our goal is to promote an active and curious student body at Purdue, high engagement, and support for club organizations and surrounding local businesses. We hope to work together with clubs and businesses in Purdue to create an incentive system to back our point system, allowing students to cash in points for bragging rights and merchandise. This app is intended to support Purdue University and all the people that make up our community. Boiler up with BeBoiler!
How we built it
Our Tech Stack is made up of Flask for Backend and React Native on frontend. We developed heavily with Expo, an open source platform that allows seamless integration between IOS and Android apps. In addition to our tech stack, we aimed to implement Groq's API to write engaging messages to users in the push notifications.
Challenges we ran into
Our team is comprised of all computer engineers, so app development is definitely a newer area for all of us. We took a lot of time researching for beginner friendly resources, basic development tools, and ways to bring our app to a different level. Some specific challenges we faced were API compatibility and limitations, efficient division of labor, and differentiating our design with many of the top competing social media apps currently. In addition, integration between frontend and backend was difficult to figure out. We were able to overcome a lot of these challenges through strong communication and planning enough time to work through these. With tools like Expo Snack, Groq's API, and lightweight frameworks, we were able to put together BeBoiler, an app we are proud to say is a new and unique system of bringing people together.
Accomplishments and What we learned
Our team is proud of our ability to overcome a large learning curve in the past day. Within 24 hours, each member of our team learned a lot about using React, creating unique styling, integration techniques, and Flask. We are also proud of creating something we ourselves are excited to use and something to offer for Purdue!
What's next for BeBoiler.
With the time limitation, we had to choose the most important features of our app to develop. In the future, we want BeBoiler to become something much larger through the following features:
- Album Collection for Event Organizers to use as promotional material
- Weekly, Monthly, and Yearly Recaps of Events
- Business tab featuring potential incentives
- Filters for other student events happening in the area (based on free food, free merch, fundraising, etc.)
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.