LinkUp

Inspiration

As college freshmen, we have experienced a major shift in our social circles when coming to college. Friends that we are accustomed to seeing every day are no longer by our side, and we are forced to make new connections. With large classes, highly variable schedules and different availabilities, building a supportive network can prove to be extremely challenging. One of the most significant aspects of being a college freshman is realizing that you have no one to eat meals with or no one to hang out with when you are free. This is why we created an intuitive tool to help students find each other in an effort to mitigate social isolation in youths.

What it does

Through this website, students can select everyday activities they plan to attend, such as eating in the dining halls, going to the gym, etc. By specifying the time and place, the student will be matched up with another student attending the same activity. The student will receive the phone number and a short blurb of the person they're matched up with, and will meet up with their match at the specified time.

How we built it

We used HTML, CSS, Javascript, and jQuery to design the front-end webpages. For data-storing and data-retrieval, we used PHP, Ajax, and SQL tables.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many programming challenges because we are all relatively new to programming. We had to learn PHP and Ajax syntax from scratch. Furthermore, our prototype had many pages and this proved very difficult to maintain and code because of the extensiveness of our project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're extremely proud of our ability to work as a team and collaborate effectively with each other. The fact that managed to pull through with working a model speaks volumes to us and means the world. We're also very proud of all the new concepts we learned, as well as our newfound familiarity with handling different programs and languages. Furthermore, we take a lot of pride in how dedicated our members were to the project and the passion that we poured into this project.

What we learned

We learned how to streamline the planning process of an entire project, how to delegate to team members, work with large amounts of code, and collaborating efficiently. Of course, we also learned a lot of new programming syntax and a new effectiveness with GitHub.

What's next for LinkUp

We plan to further develop this project to incorporate more features and to streamline the features that we already have. For example, we designed and animated an entire loading screen but was unable to incorporate it into our current project due to time restraints. In addition, we would love to expand the features to apply to many more populations that experience social isolation.