CommUNITY

While we were brainstorming ideas, we got on the topic of the activities we did in high school. Derek was in the environmental club, Chris was in honor society, Hanbin competed in Science Olympiads, and Ethan was in his church club. A common experience we shared was that these clubs required some sort of volunteering. That is when we came up with the idea of CommUNITY, a website that matches students to community service opportunities.

CommUNITY allows students to search for volunteering opportunities in the local area in one quick search. All they have to do is make an account with a username and password then they can filter different opportunities based on their skillset and interests. The student dashboard then organizes all of the upcoming events they signed up for as well as tracks the hours of previous events they have already attended.

The website also allows organizations to post events if they need volunteers. For example, if a local library needs volunteers for their summer daycare program. They can go on CommUNITY and post that they need X volunteers, on Y date, and they are looking for Z skills. The organizer dashboard consists of features like the number of volunteers already signed up, as well as how many more they need.

This was the first time we have ever built a website so there were a lot of new skills we had to learn. We split the workload into three different sections. Two of us worked on the back ending, one of us worked on the front ending and UI, and the last person worked on setting up the database. We used python for the back ending and html for the website design. We tried not using AI too much as we wanted to really learn and absorb the process of creating an app. We mostly limited it to formatting the page designs and programming the UI we didn’t know how to program.

We ran into a lot of problems during the hackathon, but our biggest one was trying to merge the front end with the back end. Since we had teams working on different parts, sometimes they wouldn't exactly match up with each other. However we were able to fix this by asking AI to identify these inconsistencies.

We are really proud of how it came out and more importantly the story and purpose behind CommUNITY. During the hackathon, we had discussions about ethics in programming. Our goal was to create something that produces some sort of real life impact. Although there’s some technical features that we could have improved upon, we still learned a lot and had an amazing time.