Beavs Social

Inspiration

As college students ourselves, we understand that it can be quite difficult to socialize in this post-Covid era. To help ease this transition to college, we've developed this app to make it easier for people to socialize and connect with others to allow students to enjoy and make the most of the college experience.

What it does

The app focuses on creating a collaborative environment that allows users to create chats with students and let students create different types of events which lets other students know about different types of activities that are happening nearby. A student could also customize their usernames and create group chats with the option to create a private dm too.

How we built it

We used Python for the back end and NextJS for the front end. To style the app we used TailwindCSS. Firebase database was used to store the data and Flask was used for the API server.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges that we had were time management and structuring the work. Some technical problems that we were having were things such as implementing the chat groups because we were trying to run the app, and we were getting some errors that took time to resolve.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were happy that we have a functioning chat system that allows students to chat with other students on homework topics or for connection building. We also have a functioning event-building system that lets students create different events.

What we learned

We learned how to implement a NextJS client along with Flask for the API server. We also learned how to implement the Firestore database and Realtime database to store data from users.

What's next for Beavs Social

We plan on hosting this app on a hosting website such as Render or Vercel. This will allow the website to go live and for students at Oregon State to use it publically. In the future, we also plan on deploying this at other universities so that other students would also get an easy way to collaborate with other students.