Branch: Connecting Mentors to Students

Sidenote: accidentally checked of the Wolfram Scholarship. Sadly didn’t use any Wolfram API in this. Sorry!

The Pitch

Branch as a concept is an app that directly connects people to people, specifically mentors to students. Whether it be a mentor for finances, education, or just a mentor to talk to, Branch can allow those in need to find someone in their community. It provides those in low-income homes with opportunities to learn and grow from people within their communities. And for a first-gen immigrant like me, it can help integrate people within their new communities.

An argument that could be made is that social media can replace the role of this sort of thing, however, I do believe it's challenging to connect one-on-one with someone on standard social media apps, especially a tutor or a mentor, without ever meeting them in person. I hope that Branch can act like an intermediary, something to help get that first interaction going!

Impact

Branch as a concept could help first generation immigrants in predominantly low-income communities integrate into their community and find opportunities for education, growth, and support. It's rather difficult to find free opportunities, and sometimes even harder to make that first connection. Branch, as the name suggests, can help people branch out their social network and feel connected to the community around them. In turn, mentors are able to connect with students and grow their social network and help out their community.

Inspiration

I was inspired by my struggle to find people to help me within my community. I often felt alone not in terms of education, but in dealing with other life struggles. An app like Branch would allow students like me to connect with someone within the community who can support and guide me.

What it does

Right now, all my app has is the interface (ie. tabs to view mentors and students), a place to post new mentors and students, and a database for mentors and students. However, currently, the database is disconnected from the actual UI. I struggled to link it and ended up running out of time.

In the future, I hope that people can search and filter for either students or teachers within the app and view short descriptions, then send messages automatically through email. Currently, each mentor/student object has an email and I prepared it for future growth, but because of my inexperience, I wasn't able to complete it in time.

How I built it

I built the shell of Branch with literally zero knowledge of C# and Xamarin starting July 30 (saw this hackathon late and thought it would be cool to try. When I tell you I watched 6 hours of tutorials and even spent even longer tinkering around trying stuff out, I'm not lying (also thank you James Montemagno, literally saved me.) I tried out more advanced things like Model-ModelView-Model, which may have led to my struggle to connect the database to the UI, but I'm happy I did it.

In terms of packages and other helpers, I used MvvmHelpers, SQLite (for the not working but also their database), and Visual Studio 2022.

Challenges I ran into

Everything. Didn't know how Visual Studio worked, or how to download packages, let alone code in C# or Xamarin. I had only ever coded in JavaScript before this, but even then I never delved into object-oriented coding, collections, lists, APIs, etc. My inexperience was the biggest challenge I ran into.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud that I'm even submitting this. I didn't think I could learn to do any of this myself, let alone have anything to submit for the hackathon. Although my code is super basic, I'm happy that I was able to push myself out of my comfort zone, learn some Xamarin and C#, and just learn in general. And learning the overall basics of MVVM. That was a lot of work for me.

What I learned

I learned that it's not too bad to learn by yourself at home. In terms of things I learned content-wise, the list is endless. I learned: what a list is, what a collection is, what back-end coding is, how UI and back-end coding work, commands, and data binding, the list could go on for hours. I'm proud of myself, despite the kind of lackluster product. I had a blast learning how to create UI with code, and I can't wait to learn more in the future.

The following code, although simple, was all completely new to me. From the formatting, to the actual properties themselves, I'm very proud of the progress I made!

            <StackLayout Orientation="Horizontal" HorizontalOptions="Center" VerticalOptions="Start" Padding="10">
                <Frame CornerRadius="20" HasShadow="True">
                    <Label Text="Mentor" FontAttributes="Bold"/>
                </Frame>
                <Switch Scale="1.3" OnColor="BurlyWood" ThumbColor="SaddleBrown" IsToggled="{Binding IsStudent}"/>
                <Frame CornerRadius="20" HasShadow="True">
                    <Label Text="Student" FontAttributes="Bold"/>
                </Frame>
            </StackLayout> 

What's next for Branch: Connecting Mentors to Students

What's next is to hopefully continue to work at it and create a final product. I want to have it show mentors by location, and potentially by communities. The big goal would be that each community (like a university) or city can create communities within Branch and people in these communities can network with other people. This can create a more inclusive environment overall, and also provide an easier way to find support for those who need it.

I also really badly wanted to implement more design features (I'm mainly a graphic designer) but alas, learning how to code came first!

Built With

• android-emulator
• c#
• mvvm
• sqlite
• visual-studio
• xamarin