Companion

We all have days when everything is going wrong, and getting help can be scary. Companion is a friend that is at the tip of your figures and allows you to chat with a them, blog and simply relax.

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Inspiration

Personally I often struggle with my own emotions and never know where to go to during these times. I feel like anyone I would go to will either not understand or judge me all together. Talking to people can be very frustrating and often counter-productive. My team members had similar sentiments as we all do struggle with mental health these days. We really wanted to create an app where everyone could just feel safe, write a blog that only the individual could see and chat with someone who will definitely not judge me - a chatbot.

##What it does This leads us to what does this app exactly do. There are 4 sections to it: blogging, chatting, looking at inspirational posts/videos and a hotline page. Overall the general idea is to create a safe space where you can be distracted from your own thoughts and maybe even talk it out with the bot.

How we built it

We built the UI through Adobe XD software, where we gave it some functionality and you can look at the genera idea of the app through it. It gave a good idea of how the app is suppose to work, but it was more of a prototype. The link to it will be attached in the try it out section.

After completing the UI we decided to move to backend and using fireblade and react-native we successfully exported all the code to Visual Studio Code where we could give more functionality to the application.

Through VSC we edited the Javascript to make buttons functional and we used react-native and the expo app to test whether our app is actually working and if the changes we were making were positive or negative.

Challenges we ran into

We spent around 4 hours trying to export the code from Adobe XD to Visual Studio Code, and it took many hours of trying to debug the react-native terminal. Very few mentors had any idea how to exactly help us, which is why it took so long. We also realized that none of our phones are the correct size for the size we made the app in, so we had to fully re-scale the app to be able to get to the buttons on our phones. Lastly adjusting computer-created Javascript was proven to be very difficult, specifically considering that none of us actually knew javascript at all before this competition.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The biggest accomplishment was when we got the button to work through Javascript at 2 in the morning. It was a great applause from everyone and best moment in the last 24 hours . We also really bonded over this day, as none of us knew each other before yesterday.

What we learned

We learned almost everything we used to complete this project in the last 24 hours, because this was all of ours first hackathon and we all aren't very experienced. Which is why we had to step up and really try to apply ourselves and learn to be able to complete the project. We learned how to use Adobe XD, Javascript, React-Native and a lot more.

What's next for Companion

Our next step is to create a functional chatbot, as we didn't have enough time to complete that part. We also have a lot more backend work to complete for the future of this project like the password and sign-in using the cloud. Nonetheless we made a good prototype and are quite proud of it.

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