Bridges

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  Log In

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  Create a Bridge with our Daily Challenge!

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  Upload your response to the daily challenge

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  View your friends' posts

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  Like and comment to show your appreciation and connect with others

Inspiration

Culture is everywhere, but it can be hard to access it authentically. Travel is expensive, museums are time consuming and don't always respect the cultures they represent, and finding people to talk with about a culture can be difficult. Even with social media, finding connections can be hard because of how vast the network is.

What it does

Bridges makes it easy to build authentic cultural connections. Our fully interactive app provides a platform where people can share their cultures and learn from others in a fun and accessible way.

Users kick off the day with a Bridge (daily challenge) that prompts them to share something from either their culture (e.g. share a photo of a cultural festival) or one that the app highlights (share your favorite Filipino dish). Users can see posts that their friends make and connect with people via comments and DMs if they want to learn more. In addition, users can see posts from previous days to explore different nuances of cultures and access a map that shows where people are posting from to see how far their Bridges can take them.

Bridges allows people to view cultural artifacts and highlights straight from the source, and makes it easy to build a community around learning about a culture.

How we built it

We started with designing a prototype. We focused on the core features of showing users Bridges, allowing them to upload, and building a feed. Then, we added features such as filtering via data and viewing a map to enhance how much the user can connect with a culture and prototyped via Figma. When we were ready to build, we used Adalo, a low code platform that allowed us to build a fully functional application for mobile and desktop.

Challenges we ran into

Since Adalo is low code, we ran into some limitations on how much customization we could include. However, we got creative and found other ways to implement features. For example, we couldn't add icons for liking and commenting directly on a post, so we had them pop up on a separate page that would appear when a user clicked on a post.

This was also a great opportunity to learn how to work in a team in a fast paced environment. We're all juniors in computer science, so we had lots of different ideas about how things could look/be implemented. However, we learned to compromise and work with each other so we could achieve our common goal of building this product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our app is fully interactive. It was challenging to get all the separate components to work with each other, but in the end we created a cohesive product.

We built an upload feature and real time feed, enabling our users to share their culture from their perspective. This heightens the authenticity of what is shared on our platform.

To enhance the user experience, we also enabled filtering by date, the daily challenge, and culture.

What we learned

Creating a design before you develop is smart, and thinking through features first can save lots of time. Collaboration is valuable and we often found ourselves helping each other with our work without even realizing it. There are a lot of ways to create connections, but leveraging the technologies and access points that people already have can yield better results.

What's next for Bridges

We will expand to allow small businesses to better reach their target audience. We want to allow small businesses that create artisanal cultural goods to showcase their products on relevant challenge days. These business' need audiences who are interested in learning more about culture, and that matches our audience exactly, and can be very useful to these businesses and take them to the next level.

Built With

• adalo