What it does
Designed to combat social polarization, Cosmic Convos is an application where users sign up and take a quick 10 question quiz placing them in to one of 8 personality planets. Users are then matched up against "aliens" (people from different personality planets!) and have 2 minutes to get to know one another. After the 2 minutes are up, planets are reviewed and users decide if they want to stay friends and view eachothers bytes in the future! A byte is a small text snipped users post about anything! How your day is going, a joke, etc! Find people of all planets to increase your profile diversity score!
How we built it
We built this using next.js along with react, html, CSS, and JavaScript. The back-end is entirely custom built to use csv files as a local datastore, with API endpoints to pull from the front end. We initially drew the concept out on an iPad, and then prototyped in Figma and began working on the project. We started with a skeleton of the HTML and continued to build for the 24 hours from there.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into many challenges since it was our first time using react, such as unintended script behaviors, variable issues, and general lack of knowledge. We continued to learn and get through our struggles, such as learning HTML as well.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
This was our first hackathon! Having some team members who have never coded before, this was a great challenge and we all learned a ton. We are proud of how far we were able to come in 24 hours and the amount of fun we had along the way.
What we learned
A ton about react! And web development in general. Team members learned HTML for the first time ever, and figma! Learning about how databases and API endpoints work was also very helpful.
What's next for Cosmic Convos
Cosmis Convos has the backend nearly finished, so the next steps will be tying the front end of the software in to the back end. Then we will polish, and have a more working prototype!
Inspiration
We were very inspired by the first talk at the hackathon, about fighting polarization in community. We took aspects from this presentation and incorporated them in to our project. We were also inspired by Omegle and how you talk to strangers, but don't like how you can limit who you talk to, so added a very loosely based conversation feature similar to omegle.
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