Beyond The Darkness

Inspiration

We created the Beyond the Darkness chat rooms app following a dear friend Alex's tragic suicide. It's a tribute to Alex's memory, a beacon of hope, and a testament to the strength of human connection.

What it does

The app lets people connect with other people facing similar issues. They can join a chatroom or start a room by entering their mood score. Mood score is how one is feeling currently. This is then available to all the participants. This way, they can all see how everyone is doing, which can direct the flow of conversation.

How we built it

We built it using MIT App Inventor. We added lots of enhanced features to make the prototype as close to an actual app as possible. We also used Streamlit to make a web homepage that describes our purpose and goal. Users can also download the app directly through the homepage.

Challenges we ran into

Small features like centering an image and adding a background image using Streamlit were not available which caused some trouble as we had to do extensive research to figure that out.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to learn a completely new platform- Streamlit from scratch and build a webpage using it. We are proud of coming up with an idea that can actually make a difference in someone's life. We are also proud to have built all the logistics (i.e. app name, app logo) by ourselves.

What we learned

We learned that Streamlit is a very advanced and easy-to-use platform for web development with Python. It has a simple way to host a local web server while editing and viewing simultaneously.

What's next for Beyond The Darkness

Implement an AI so users can talk to AI when there is no one available to talk- making it an app where you are never really alone. The AI will be created using everyday chats, making sure it has a moral code and can reach out to authorities directly if the situation gets out of hand.