Inspiration
We were inspired to make this app in a random discussion on the way to the Hackathon, specifically in relation to how university life in Australia is so much more constrained to university life elsewhere in the world simply due to the fact that people don't live on campus, and have less spontaneous meetups. With the prompt of connection, we wanted to create an app that would help create the spontaneous moments that drive connection.
What it does
CampusThreads cleverly adds all of its users into a weekly groupchat, organised by shared classes or university on the same day, with the sole intention of this group meeting up and growing everyone’s network.
However, the twist lies in the way it matches people. In a nutshell, the group chat you are added to either has one person you are already friends with, or two (outside specific cases to be tackled later). In the case that it has 2 people you are friends with, you can act as the “host” during the meetup, helping liaise two people who know you into becoming friends and filling out your social graph with edges. Otherwise, you can reliably know that the meeting you are going to is with a person you are already comfortable with, and one of their friends, allowing you to easily make a friendship in a low-pressure, conversation-inducing situation.
The app is smart too. A successful meeting will result in the two users who were previously mutuals adding each other as friends. If a meeting did not happen, then the two users will not be added in the same group chat for a small period of time, giving each other a break (and taking the hint on why they potentially didn’t meet in the first place). If a user initially starts with no friends, they get added to a large group chat of people with the same circumstance, kickstarting their network too.
The app taken in data of free rooms, as well as the .ics file that every UNSW student gets for their timetable, and crunches this data to make the most ideal group chats. People who are consistently successful in connecting their two friends are also pushed to connect more of their mutuals, as proven socialites who are more than comfortable including people. All in all, the minor details here make for a smooth and frictionless experience for all the users involved with the app
Challenges we ran into
Challenges we ran into were related to the initial way that the app would work, which we believed was unsatisfying. Initially, the app ideas that we thought of implementing in this project were features that would not yield any benefit, and we were unable to finalise the overall concept of the app for a significant amount of time.
Additionally, we ran into trouble in the fact that our demo was not operational, and rather just an idealistic version of how it worked. In our second iteration we had to add data persistence in order to make the prototype of the app fit for demonstration
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are especially proud of this project, considering it is both mine and Arnav's first hackathon. In this, we were proud of completing a project that we thought would actually make a significant impact on university life (the goal we started with), as well as the fact that we are actually proud that we were able to learn the systems and implementation surrounding our idea (Github, python etc...)
What we learned
We were able to broaden our knowledge of our usage of Git, as well as our implementation of python in general in creating the prototype for a chat.
What's next for CampusThreads
We would ideally take feedback we get from others, either judges or other participants in the hackathon, and try to build on this app after the hackathon is over, to see if we can make a truly competitive product for a potential launch
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