CareLink

Peer-Powered Support: Your Safe Space for Student Assistance.

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Inspiration

After a thoughtful discussion of what kind of web application we should develop for this hackathon, we discovered how we had similar experiences as CST students - making that first step in seeking help and becoming vulnerable in doing so. This inspired us to make an application that provided students an online platform that could be used to help make that initial step easier for them.

What it does

Our platform enables students to seek support for a variety of issues with ease. By describing their concerns, AI matches them with four peers equipped to provide assistance. Peer authenticity is guaranteed by counselor verification, and user anonymity ensures a secure and confidential experience.

How we built it

We employed a diverse range of technologies to develop both our front and back end. On the backend, we utilized Express to manage API calls from the front end, facilitating the retrieval of necessary data from database queries, ChatGPT API calls, and other required information. Our server infrastructure was implemented using NodeJS. As for the frontend, we opted for React based on our team members' familiarity with the technology, its exceptional modularity, and its capability to manage routing seamlessly. The frontend exclusively manages all communication with the backend through API POST and GET requests.

Challenges we ran into

Debugging back-end related issues regarding the chat feature: We were facing issues regarding how certain tables interacted in our relational database, we resolved this by creating an erd to find a solution to some many-many relationships we had

Front-end related issues: Having issues fetching the response from ChatGPT about the Peer recommendations from the backend to the frontend page that needed to display this. Was eventually fixed by not using Reacts version of POST request and just using regular AJAX calls

Trying to stay awake and continue working on the project at the last leg of the project

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We followed the Hackathon Prompt theme fully Successful use of ChatGPT API in integrating it with our backend work flow We were able to fully implement the MVP’s that we had planned in the beginning of the project We achieved outstanding teamwork synergy by collectively investing our skills and efforts into this hackathon project, ensuring that each team member contributed their strengths.

What we learned

We learned a lot about our capabilities as developers, and how much our skills had progressed since the beginning of the program. In addition, we learned the importance of communication, and being able to articulate to each other when debugging, planning out features, and checking in on each other as a team. Half of our team had experience with React whereas the other half did not so some of us were able to learn React while others were able improve their React skills as we used many new components and animations None of us had experience implementing web sockets (which were needed for chatting) on NodeJS so we had to learn about that as well. Luckily some of us had experience with web sockets in other languages so some knowledge was able to be ported over.

What's next for CareLink

This could possibly be a feature that could be integrated with BCIT’s website (specifically, the student counseling page), which would require implementing an improved authentication process (to ensure counselors and peers are properly verified and added). We could also develop well defined security measures for our back-end processes and database queries. Additionally, we could add more features related to AI (Q&A page generates common questions asked by users to peers/counselors), a forum page where users/peers/counselors can interact.

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