FocusMates

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Elevator Pitch FocusMates revolutionised finding the ideal study buddy based on your shared skills and helping you beat procrastination by working together.

Inspiration In today’s academic environment, many students struggle with procrastination, lack of motivation, and diIiculty finding peers to collaborate with on shared learning goals (Wepf et al., 2021). Study groups tend to form by chance rather than alignment of skills or interests, leaving students without the peer support they need to succeed (HeIernan, 2021). We set out to solve this by creating a smarter, more intentional way to connect learners based on their academic backgrounds and study habits.

What it does The dashboard shows the user details. The matching algorithm ranks users based on shared skills, displaying mutual strengths and a compatibility rating. After matches are found, users can connect with each other: the Pomodoro timer starts, with chat and videocall available. Finally, the results of the session are displayed, along with the points gained and current streak.

How we built it We built FocusMates using Next.js for the frontend, Firebase for backend services with Firestore for data storage and Auth for authentication.

Challenges we ran into One of the challenges we faced was communication, since we had one team member online while the rest were in person. However, we were able to overcome the challenges by using features like Zoom’s screen control to remotely help to solve problems with VS Code.

What's next for FocusMates We can expand to more users and implement more advanced matching.