Bridgen

Inspiration

We were inspired by our past experiences volunteering at Cyber-Seniors, where teenagers teach seniors how to use technology, and creating a friendship program that pairs students up with a new friend based on their matching interests and languages they speak. We realized that seniors, like teenagers, also have a significant amount of knowledge and experience that is necessary to be shared with teenagers; so we decided to build a digital bridge between the two generations that can teach and learn skills from each other.

What it does

Bridgen is a website where youth and seniors are paired up together to teach each other new skills. After they fill in a survey on our website, we pair them with someone who can learn what they teach and teach what they learn. We also added a feature to let users be put into groups, so they can learn from more people, and badges to encourage users to stay active.

How we built it

We used Replit and Figma to create a template for our website's frontend. Then, we have used React (TSX) to write both the frontend and backend code with Replit and Cursor's help for the bugs. Finally, we have integrated our frontend with our algorithm written in Python.

Challenges we ran into

We had trouble with putting users into groups since the gale-shapley pairing algorithm was made for users from different groups (youth and elders), so we had to make a separate function with an adjusted algorithm that can pair users who are from the same group.