Inspiration
We all had the experience of having to look for opportunities in high school to fulfill our volunteer requirements. Due to the lack of opportunities, we decided to provide a platform that would enable the youth (millennials), as well as older generations, to make a positive impact through civic engagement. We used LinkedIn as initial inspiration for this platform.
What It Does
Helping Hand provides a platform for organizations to post volunteer opportunities that people can find more easily. Once a volunteer opportunity is complete, the organization will verify the completion of the opportunity and will be recorded for the users, contributing to their achievements. We focused on getting the backbone of our platform up and running, while setting aside the verification element for future development. The website provides a feature for the user to generate useful documents such us Volunteer History and Volunteer Data that can serve as a professional reference.
How We Built It
Our group used Weebly as our front-end development platform, injecting HTML and Javascript to add additional functionality to the website. We used Firebase's database to store server-side data and implement user authentication.
Challenges We Ran Into
The majority of our group was inexperienced with web development and its technologies, so after making the decision of making a web application, we had a difficult time selecting what tools to use. After choosing our development tools, we had to perform a lot of research to implement Helping Hand. The hardest challenge we encountered was working with Weebly. At first glance, Weebly was a great platform that allowed us to bypass the hurdle of web development but as time went on, we found it to be very difficult for our development because of how technically limiting it was with embedding HTML and Javascript. Unwilling to yield in the face of seeming defeat, we pushed the boundaries of what we knew to be possible as we tackled the Weebly/Scripting/Firebase compatibility issue head on.
Accomplishments That We're Proud Of
Considering that this was our first hackathon, we are extremely proud of the conception and implementation of Helping Hand and the team dynamic we had throughout the whole event. We perservered through the difficulties of inexperience with web development and finished the event knowing that we gave it our all.
What We Learned
We learned how to use JavaScript, HTML, and Firebase. More specifically, we each took on a different role, and collaborated to efficiently achieve our ultimate goal. Along the way, we had to learn not only what our own areas of work involved, but also how it interacted with the rest of the group's. None of us have ever been in a hackathon before so this is a proud first hack for all of us! We learned 95% of what we coded in these 36 hours during this hackathon, so we were astonished to see what we could do with such new information in such a short time period.
What's Next For Helping Hand
Some of short term goals for Helping Hand are to continue to innovate and polish our functionality and features, such as viewing and creating posts, improving users' achievements, and the implementation a verification system.
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