EZ Email

Home Screen
General Recommendations Screen
Email Template Screen

Inspiration

Our team derived our inspiration from our own personal experiences writing emails to teachers - it was often a challenge for us to approach writing formal emails. This lead us to think of the millions of other students, especially with the COVID-19 pandemic making email communication a more common occurrence, in the same position. Furthermore, we realized that an email tool could also benefit those from backgrounds in which professional development resources are not common.

What it does

The EZ-Email is a hack that helps students and users build confidence and skills in writing formal emails. The hack features 3 screens. In the 1st screen, we introduce the app and how it can be utilized by students. In the 2nd screen, the top of the page provides overall recommendations that students can use for all emails. On the bottom of the page, we give students the ability to choose from a list of specific topics that they would like to see email templates on. Once they choose the topic, it takes you to the 3rd screen, which lists 2+ email templates where students can gain inspiration from or even copy paste word for word. Overall, the app provides students a resource from which they can learn this crucial skill.

How I built it

Our team used Android Studio to put together this project. We also integrated the Google Firebase Realtime Database into our program. In the Android Studio environment we used java as well as XML to put together the app. Additionally, we accessed our database using the Realtime Database API.

Challenges I ran into

We originally planned to write the application as a python web app, but we were having many issues creating a GUI using python. After several hours of work we decided to migrate the project to Android Studio, an environment more geared at graphical development. Another aspect that we spent an excess amount of time on is the UI design. After a convoluted process of researching color combinations and testing countless backgrounds from a variety of sources, we finally came to a screen we believed was simple and clean.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Our entire team is proud of putting together an android application in such a short amount of time. We discovered that we were able to split tasks by our expertise in order to efficiently complete the project. Furthermore, we are proud of making it through our first Hackathon.

What I learned

As a team, we learned the importance of collaboration and specialization. If we hadn’t worked in parallel to complete tasks, we may have not finished the final product in time.

What's next for EZ Email

The EZ Email team believes that this hack has lots of potential for expansion and upgrades. One of the crucial aspects of our submission is that everything, such as information and templates, is stored in the Firebase Realtime Database. Through this method, we are able to broadcast changes to users immediately instead of forcing them to take time and storage to download an update. Additionally, the Firebase Realtime Database can be entered by people without any formal computer science training. The process is simple and efficient. Due to these advantages, EZ Email can easily rapidly implement new information, new tips, and changes.

Furthermore, another innovative idea we have is to onboard a network of professionals for exclusive advice and tips. By outreaching and communicating with professionals, we are able to listen to opinions and viewpoints that go further in depth with greater analysis. We believe professionals will definitely be willing to input their advice into EZ-Email because it provides a medium for them to express their knowledge and gain a greater following.

Finally, we can integrate advanced computing techniques such as machine learning to make the EZ Email app able to learn from datasets of prewritten emails and be able to write its own formal emails.