Flock

Inspiration

Our team is well acquinted with air travel, and noticed that one unspoken aspect of it can be loneliness. Airports can be a strange phenomena when travelling alone, where regardless of being surrounded by thousands of people, if one is without friends and family they can feel alone and closed off. Combined with the sheer amount of time it takes in air travel, this can become mentally draining. Even at airports, there are often tons of things to do which are overlooked due to lacking media presence.

What it does

Thus, we created an app to solve the problem of air travel loneliness: a one stop air travel social media app! The name "Flock" accurately represents our motivation behind the app: flock travellers together! The app firstly gives a user the opportunity to explore the airport and surrounding area. We did this by adding a forum section where users can view posts by fellow travellers. The feed of these posts is personalizable, where the user can sort by duration, price, inside or outside security, and type of activity. These posts are rated by other users using upvotes and downvotes. Next, the app gives people on the same flight the ability to chat with each other. This feature was made with more freedom to the users, where they can use this chat to do what they find suitable! Finally, since it is an airport we have a feature to view the status and details of your flight in the same app for your convenience.

How we built it

We built it using the MERN Stack: MongoDB, Express.js, React, and Node.js. Git and Github was used for collaboration. Additionally, we also used a flight api to pull flight data in real time.

Challenges we ran into

The api we had access to was unreliable and would often deliver inconsistent data: which we had to work around.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It was the first hackathon of 3/4 of our teammates, and all three of those teammates had no experience with development in any of the technologies of the MERN stack: hence it was a learning curve for all of us!
Special Credits to Casey Pei for the logo design!

Built With

• react