Dear Community

Dear Community is an innovative collective diary. Our mission is to connect communities by creating a safe and anonymous environment for people to share heartfelt sentiment to those around them.

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Inspiration

We were inspired to make this app after discovering Gather, a platform that allows users to video chat in a virtual environment where you can interact with avatars. Like Gather, our goal was to make a truly immersive - but safe - community where people could meet through their most genuine selves.

What it does

Dear Community prides itself in its simplicity. This is how it works: 1.) Users will input their zip code to be linked to a community specific virtual environment. 2.) Each community will have their own personalized top rated question for the day. You can choose to answer it, or skip this step. 3.) Users can explore the virtual world through their avatar, listen to what others have said in response to the daily question, and reward those whose answers touched them in any way. And that's it!

How we built it

For the front-end, we used Javascript, HTML, and CSS. With the help of React, we were able to connect our front end to our Flask backend and MySQL database. We would not have been able to build this without the tutorials from Drew Conley and sprites from the asset pack Sprout Lands.

Challenges we ran into

It is all of our first years studying computer science, so we racing against time to learn as much as we could. We had an idea that we were all passionate about, but very little experience on how to actually implement it. The biggest challenge that we faced was to research and implement a functional data-reliant game in only 36 hours. Given the scope of our application, it was necessary to develop both a scalable backend database and a user-friendly browser game. Both features required an extensive learning and building process compounded by difficulties merging separate work.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Dear Community is proud to present a heartwarming, interactive way for communities to learn and listen to the thoughts of those around them. We're proud in our attempt to help bridge a growing divide between the people of our communities using a format that encourages interaction and intelligent design.

What we learned

Our team ventured into new territory with the creation of this web application. Along with learning about APIs, full-stack development, and cloud-based databases, we learned to build a functioning, browser-based mini game with customized graphics. We also gained experience working collaboratively in a shared remote environment.

What's next for Dear Community

The next steps for Dear Community are to scale up active users and implement additional features to enhance the user experience. Ultimately, we want the application to be community-driven and community-focused. One future improvement is to utilize voice-recordings as a medium for user-inputted responses. Voice-recordings are a fun, powerful way connect people on an interpersonal-level without having to sacrifice the safety of anonymity and honesty. In addition, we would like to add more and bigger maps (maybe even some with games!). Because we were in a rush to get things working, we relied on pre-made sprites, but we would love to recruit a designer to help with design!

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