connect

Form stronger relationships with others!

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Inspiration 💡

I’m in many team meetings for the research lab at my college, and there’s often new team members that join each quarter. To create a better sense of community within the lab, we try to ask everyone questions that’s not related to work before each work session. It’s always a good time when questions are engaging!😊 My teammates have interesting lives outside of sitting in long Zoom calls. But oftentimes, it’s hard to think of a fun question to ask everyone. Either someone has asked it before or we’re too brain-dead from classes to actually socialize.😅

To solve that problem, I’ve recently been searching online for questions to avoid that period of awkward silence when we’re thinking about questions. Before each meeting, I’d look through websites (dating websites have a lot of juicy questions😂) and choose questions that were never asked before. It’s a bit tedious when there’s so many team meetings and different people to remember, so I thought it’d be more convenient to create a mobile app that could just give me random questions with just one tap. In addition, I thought it’d be fun to suggest events outside of work meetings (that one time when we played Among Us was pretty fun), such as playing games or hanging out at the beach when COVID is over.🙃 And out came the idea for Connect!

(Sorry this was so long...)

What it does 🥰

Connect is a mobile app that helps you form stronger bonds with people! It has three main features:

  1. ❓ Questions - Whether you’re waiting in line for a roller coaster ride with friends, joining a meeting with your colleagues, or talking to a cute stranger, ask questions that spark meaningful conversations. This feature allows you to find, create, and save questions to ask people. It could also randomly choose a question for you if you don’t want to look through all the available questions.
  2. 📆 Events - Planning events with people can help you get to get to know them even better. This feature provides events that you can do with people. Just like the Questions feature, you can find, create, and save an event that you would like to do with someone.
  3. 📝 Reminders - Sometimes, it’s easy to forget who someone is or what you planned to do/ask them. This feature allows you to create profiles for people whom you wish to remember and reminds you about your saved questions/events/notes for each person.

How I built it 💻

Thanks to React Native tutorials on YouTube and lots of Googling, I was able to develop Connect. Special thanks to all my labmates that inspired this app.

Challenges I ran into 😶

I ran into 3 main problems while developing this app:

  1. Some React Native modules only work for one platform and not the other, so it was overwhelming to make sure the feature I wanted to implement looks nice and works for both iOS and Android.
  2. Sadly, the Android phone emulator was really slow on my Windows laptop, and I couldn’t use an iOS simulator since XCode is only compatible with macOS. T’was stressful during the first few hours. BUT after doing some research, I found out there’s an Expo Go app that I could download on my iPhone to test while developing. Any changes I made appeared really quickly on my phone using that app. Thanks, Expo Go!🙌 Due to time constraints, I decided it was more efficient to focus on fully implementing the iOS version and use my iPhone for testing.
  3. Implementing navigation between screens took a while to understand since I planned to use Firebase user authentication (it’s easier to store all users’ data in Firestore) before letting the user access the main features of my app.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of 🥳

This is my first time attempting to develop a mobile app! I've always wanted to learn React Native in my own time, and I definitely learned a lot this time around. Although I didn't get to implement everything that I've planned, I'm happy that I got the most important Question feature done. Also, this is my first hackathon after 3 years of college!😅 I feel old, but it’s great seeing high school students start hackathons early. There’s still lots to learn from hackathons, no matter how old you are.

What I learned🧠

  1. I never imagined that I could create a mobile (iOS) app in a day and a half! I truly learned that anything is possible if you put your mind to it.
  2. Figuring out the theme colors and what/where to put content takes a lot of time and thought. Props to all the UX/UI designers out there!
  3. Expo conveniently provides a nice library of free icons: link
  4. Setting up Firebase user authentication and reading/writing data to Firestore by my own for the very first time.
  5. I’ve been missing out on meeting all these motivated people and joining such insightful workshops. Don’t focus too much on school like me haha.

What's next for connect 🤔

  • Finish the Reminders screen of my app. It's going to take some more time to figure out how to connect all my different data collections together from Firebase, but I think it's definitely possible!
  • It’d be nice if the app could save planned events to the user’s calendar app or send phone notifications a day before the saved event occurs.
  • Implement the Android version of Connect! I chose to develop a mobile app using React Native and Expo because it could help produce iOS and Android apps. I only did a little of what I planned.
  • Learn how to publish my finished product in app stores! The publishing process seems too long because I’d have to wait for my app to be reviewed and approved by the App Store, so I’ll learn more about that in my own time.

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