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Inspiration

We wanted to create something that could make mental wellness more normalised for teenagers. Growing up comes with a lot of emotions and questions about yourself, and it's not always easy to understand what you're going through, or the source of the problem. We came up with Ferret Aid as a way to help teens explore their feelings, learn more about themselves, and find practical ways to deal with the everyday problems using safe practics.

What it does

Ferret Aid is a mental check-in platform mainly aimed for teenagers. It brings together interactive assessments, self-reflection(in work), and helpful resources to encourage users to make use of healthy methodics/practics for imroving mental wellness. Instead of simply giving users a result, we want to help them discover useful next steps and make self-reflection a little easier.

How we built it

Our team consists of three people: my friend works as the full-stack developer, my other friend focuses on design, and I work on the frontend. We divided the work according to our strengths and collaborated to turn our idea into a website. While building Ferret Aid, we worked on the user interface, the overall experience idea (and half realisation with known skills, and other half with openai), and the technical parts needed to connect everything into one platform.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was connecting the backend to the frontend. None of us had much experience with database implementation and the full process of managing and connecting stored data to a web application, so figuring out how all the pieces should communicate took time. We had to learn as we went, troubleshoot unexpected issues (coming from inexperience with java coding), and coordinate our work to make the different parts of the project fit together.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that we took an idea about teenage mental wellness and started turning it into an actual web platform. Each of us contributed a different perspective, from frontend development to backend functionality and design. We're especially proud of what we've learned by working together and trying to build something that could be perspectively useful to other teenagers.

What we learned

We learned that building a web application involves much more than making the interface looking somewhat good or writing code that works on its own. The frontend, backend, database, and design all need to work together, and communication between team members matters just as much as technical skills. We also learned how important it is to keep learning and solve problems with given available information on the net even when we're working with technologies that are new to us.

What's next for ferret aid

We want to continue improving Ferret Aid by making the platform more interactive and useful. Our next steps include improving the connection between the frontend and backend, refining the user experience, and developing the self-assessment and reflection function (after the database developing) features further. In the long run, we hope to further develop Ferret Aid as a welcoming starting point for teenagers who want to understand themselves better and find reliable train-resources to help themselves (without replacing real/serious mental diagnosises).