find-a-hack

Inspiration

Since the four of us are all from different schools and had trouble forming a team on Slack, we decided to create an application that would facilitate team-building for AthenaHacks next year.

What it does

find-a-hack is an Android application that allows AthenaHacks participants to find teammates who are interested in the same hackathon categories (such as Android development, Gaming/VR or web). Our application is beneficial for beginner coders, since it does not ask for an experience level. Instead, our application will record and match participants based on their interests in the areas of Gaming/VR, Web, Android, iOS, and Hardware. This way, people of different experience levels and backgrounds can be matched into a team based on a similar interest. This application could be adopted by other hackathons or team competitions, and could be a great way for users to get to know people they wouldn’t have associated with otherwise.

How we built it

We originally envisioned an application with a user interface similar to that of Tinder—in which the user would swipe left or right to choose projects whose requirements matched their skills and experiences. Additionally, the project founder would be able to chat with the participants who were interested in the project. We decided that participants would only be known by their usernames and would not have profile pictures to increase the likelihood of team diversity (a study on Github revealed that despite overall higher approval ratings, women had less approval if they did not hide their gender. Similar experiences also happen to people of color). We decided to develop an Android application since it would be more convenient for participants to search for teammates using their phones, and because none of us had experience with Swift. We used Java and XML within Android Studio to develop the application. We also used Firebase to store our data.

Challenges we ran into

None of us had experience with Android or XML, and we were new to Hackathons. We also had two non-CS majors in our team. We were unsure how to store the data collected from our application, and how to integrate XML and Java.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud to have completed a working Android application and to be able to learn a lot about Android development. We also learned about backend and data storage services such as Firebase, and how to retrieve and store data. We are also proud to have participated in the workshops and to meet fellow competitors who share our interests.

What we learned

We learned a lot about troubleshooting, using Firebase, backend development, UI/UX, react native, Unity, data science, and Android development. We went to most of the workshops and were proud to have managed our time wisely to develop an application in such a short period of time. We also learned a lot about teamwork and supporting each other.