Serene - Teen Suicide Prevention

Serene is an app where helps teens who are struggling with their mental health reach out to professionals, connect to friends, and learn coping skills.

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Serene

Teen Suicide Prevention

Inspiration

One of our group members had one of her friends commit suicide at her school. It really left a deep mark on her, and she was surprised at how the people at her school spent a couple of hours in remembrance, but just moved on after that. She realized the prevalence of the issue through that experience, and that is how she came up with the idea.

What it does

Serene is an app where kids who are struggling with their emotions can seek help immediately. It helps them reach out to professionals, connect with friends, and learn coping skills, all in one readily accessible place.

How we built it

First, we sat down and wireramed it using paper prototyping and zoom whiteboards. Then, we made a prototype of how we wanted the app to look using Figma, and finally, we recreated it in XCode so that it would be able to function on iOS devices.

Challenges we ran into

  • A big challenge was the time constraints that we had. Because this hackathon took place during only one weekend, we weren't able to make a complete version of the app and add many things that we planned to add.
  • Another big challenge was that since we were collaborating online, it was hard to coordinate meetings because of all the different time zones that our team was based in.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

  • We are proud that we were able to make a functioning app in the short time span that we were given.
  • We are also proud of the design and colors we chose to make the final app look calming and appealing.
  • Something that was challenging was collecting data from actual teens and we made a survey and received more than 48 responses :)

What we learned

Through this project, we learned about the prevalence of teen suicide. It was shocking to mist of us that a teenager commits suicide every 40 seconds! We also learned how to do prototyping using Figma, and actually code an app using XCode. Collaboration was also a key skill that we learned, because we were all in different time zones, which sometimes made it hard, and there were also a lot of things that had to be done, with the presentation and the two prototypes. However, we think that we rose to the challenge and delivered to the best of our ability.

What’s next for Serene?

In the future, we plan to add more features to help teens with mental illness. We also hope to include more ways to de-stress and relax, and to include more sources and helpful things in the app.

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