ConnectFirstSearch

Inspiration

Being University students who've lived through the struggle of making friends online, we wanted to create a convenient platform students could use to connect with and message each other on.

What it does

ConnectFirstSearch helps students struggling to make connections due to the pandemic to meet new people with similar interests or hobbies, studying the same program, or even just being in the same year in university to help students feel closer to being in their community. Our convenient in-chat features allows out platform to be an easy-to-use single platform students need access to in order to connect with fellow students. We hope ConnectFirstSearch succeeds in helping students the relieve additional stress and anxiety from the decrease in social interactions from COVID-19 and to help them build lasting friendships.

How we built it

We built this web app using React, Javascript, HTML, CSS, and a Twilio API for our chat messaging.

Challenges we ran into

Figuring out how to implement the grommet UI into React. There were lots of modules to install which got confusing at times. Some errors were caused because of bad formatting in React, but since some of us are new to React, it was difficult to pinpoint what was causing the error.
Integrating Twilio web-based chat using node.js. Since Twilio is relatively new to us, a lot of time was spent determining how to build and implement this chat API.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We've learned of how to implement a login/signup page and routing the correct buttons and links. We've also managed to integrate a programmable chat API.

What we learned

Some of us were also new to React so through ConnectFirstSearch, we learned how to use React to build a web app. In addition, we learned how to use Twilio to build and integrate a web-based chat API.

What's next for ConnectFirstSearch

We've so far hardcoded the available list of Universities so we would like to expand this project from our existing few universities to universities all over Canada to begin with. Similarly, we hardcoded some programs and interests, but in the future, we would definitely like to offer a much wider range.