FIRST

FIRST is a community network-based web app that encourages peer-to-peer resources and guided discussion for first-generation students.

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BeepBoop Presents: FIRST

A Community Platform to Connect First-Generation Students
FIRST is a community network-based web app that encourages peer-to-peer resources and guided discussion on common struggles that first-generation students experience. Our vision is that FIRST content would be driven by its users, creating an app for students to encourage each other, get transparent advice on potentially difficult topics, and support one another through mutual experiences. Users can post questions, provide advice, or share their unique take on what it means to be a first-generation student.

Inspiration

The theme of this year's hackathon projects was social good. We began our project by thinking of products that could benefit people in a substantial way while embodying the safe, inclusive environment that Black Wings promotes. During our product design session on Figma, our team reflected on our own personal experiences at our respective colleges and identified viable products based on needs we felt were not appropriately addressed. Some of our concepts included:

  • charitable organization donation-matching
  • sort/find recycling locations
  • financial literacy education
  • social platform for underrepresented individuals in STEM:
    • transfer students
    • mature students
    • first generation students

The social platform idea resonated with several team members, as we had all experienced adversity and a lack of guidance at some point in our degrees. We selected first-generation students as our target market, with intentions to expand our product to include other identified groups in their own respective platform. By narrowing our target audience, we built several product features that would be feasible in a Hackathon setting while also challenging us to expand our skillset during development.

Target Audience: First Generation Support

While a rigid definition does not exist, we accept the inclusive classification of any individual as a first-generation student if their parents did not complete a 4-year college or university degree.

When researching the various mentorship and resources available to first-generation students, we identified the need for a designated community-driven platform. A majority of mentorship websites either focused on strictly professional relationships, or offered generic mentorship services for a premium fee. These options largely excluded students who often are price-conscious, and may be intimidated by the formal setting when seeking informal/transparent guidance. We identified several websites that offered amazing educational and personal-growth resources for first-generation students, but some required an application process, were location specific, or narrowed users by income, which further segmented this group of students who often self-identify and don't easily fit within an identical 'bucket' across all demographic traits.

According to the Center for First-Generation Student Success, over half of college students can be considered first-generation. Enrollment rates have increased over the past decade for this segment of students, but graduation rates still remain relatively low, suggesting some challenges present for these individuals that may be unique to their experience.

We used this research to identify the opportunity of developing a community network-based web app that encouraged peer-to-peer resources and guided discussion on common pain points that first-generation students experience. Our vision is that FIRST content would be driven by it's users, creating an app for students to encourage each other, get transparent advice on potentially difficult topics, and support one another through mutual experiences.

Product Features

The unique features that differentiate our app include:

  1. Question and Answer Forums
    2. All users can post and respond to questions. Categories were generated to filter this forum, including Applications, Courses, Majors, Mental Health, Relationships, Financial Planning and Time Management. Responses can also be viewed by the poster or flair of the user; student, new grad or professional.
  2. Guided Prompts
    3. Sometimes you want to hear from others in similar situations as yourself, but you aren't sure how to phrase it. Our guided prompts were designed with this in mind! Daily prompts will generate for all users, allowing individuals to provide their own insight to the community question regardless of expertise, encouraging active feedback and a 'sounding board' for like-minds. Sometimes you just want to feel like you aren't alone! Daily prompts are archived and can be viewed.
  3. Resource Connections
    4. We recognize there are tons of external resources already made and ready for first-generation students, but sometimes this can be difficult to find across the whole web. This feature will help sort through these resources and provide direct links to users on extra resources to may provide additional guidance, tips, and tools.

Domain.com

Proposed domain names registered at domain.com:
firstbutnotleast.tech
wethefirst.tech

Challenges Experienced

Since our team consists of all students, fitting in time to prioritize the hackathon amidst class deadlines and other commitments was a challenge. We set rough timelines for ourselves to make the most out of the limited time of the hackathon, which was a unique and fun challenge. Setting realistic tasks and features was important for us to create a living product without compromising on design or impact. We chose features that would doable for the time crunch and our team's skill levels, creating opportunities for future development while still launching a project we could be proud of.

This was also our first hackathon, and being online presented other unique challenges. Between coordinating across time zones and having to quickly figure out how we all communicate, prefer to work, what skills we had, and what we each wanted to gain from the hackathon, we had to be flexible with each other and adapt.

We had never built a full stack application before, so our group made the executive decision to focus on front-end development to launch our product. Our intentions were to build a back-end database that we could store, manipulate and pull data from to integrate on our app, covering archived prompts, question and answer pages, and user profile information via mongoDB. Unfortunately we determined that without a dedicated back-end in use, we would be unable to effectively connect to this database as we had planned, and the work associated with setting up these APIs and schemas was discarded in favor of retaining our stylized product we had developed thus far. This was a significant amount of resources and time spent into learning this unfamiliar framework that would've otherwise been spent on other aspects, but it was a useful and insightful learning experience regardless of it's exclusion in the project submission. Rather, this is an opportunity that we can revisit at a later date for future development.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

As this is our first hackathon, it was a great experience to be able to create our own project and see it come to fruition for a cause we are personally invested in. We built a product that we would have personally used and benefitted from if it existed, and we can walk away from this hackathon taking pride in that.

What We Learned

Half of our team had never developed a web app before, so this was a learning curve. We had never worked in a hackathon environment before, so learning how to adapt, contribute to our team, and take advantage of sponsor networking events and workshops within a short amount of time was challenging but fun. Learning how to prioritize and work in a segmented environment is a useful skill for all of us, as we will likely experience some form of remote working environment in our future professional careers. We were able to utilize the hackathon's mentors on several occasions for debugging.

Specific skills: React, MongoDB, routing, styling, APIs, Figma, and GitHub.

Future Development

While our product was designed with first-generation students in mind, there are other segments of students that would benefit from a community resource of this nature. Expansion could be focused into inclusion of other student segments such as mature students, transfer students, LGBTQ individuals, and many more. Additional features can be built off of this idea, encompassing scheduled activities/meetups, workshops and informational events, integration with school organizations and professional employee resource groups (ERGs) and sponsorships. As a social platform, individuals could be guided towards more meaningful connections and encourage mentor-mentee relationships in a structured format. Further accessibility considerations can be integrated in our UX, such as interactive options for individuals with a visual or sensory disability.

Operation of Demo

To view our project:
1) Download main branch and extract files OR clone repository to local machine
2) Open editor of choice (VS Code used for development)
3) Navigate to main branch folder
Requirement: node.js and npm must be downloaded to machine - otherwise download via nodejs.org/en/download/
4) Navigate to app (cd app)
5) command line: npm start

To learn more about our creative and design process, please visit our ProductInfo markdown file

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