Homees

Inspiration

As incoming university freshman, we were all understandably nervous about making friends, which is even more difficult with distance learning. In addition, people can sometimes be hesitant to reach out to others on social media, find it difficult to gauge who they'd be friends with, or fear being judged.

What it does

Our app simplifies the process of meeting others by matching students up based on shared interests and classes. A unique feature is that upon matching, students are anonymous. This encourages users to not judge others based on appearance or name, and to instead focus on getting to know each other through the chat. Users can share their identity once they've clicked, and there's no awkwardness if they don't. Of course, there can be safety issues associated with anonymity, so our app requires students to sign in with a campus email and has a report feature.

How we built it

We started out by drawing out a rough plan and creating mockups in Figma. We then built it in Java and Kotlin in Android Studio, and used Google Firebase for user authentication. We used Stream SDK for the chat portion.

Challenges I ran into

This was our first hackathon, as well as our first time using Android Studio and Firebase. It was definitely a challenge learning so many new concepts in a short amount of time, and we had a lot of trouble getting authentication and chat to work. Spending time working out these bugs also prevented us from implementing some of the additional features we had planned out.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to come up with the unique concept of anonymized chats, which would benefit a lot of students that struggle with introductions. Additionally, we were able to create a functional app with functional sign-in and chat.

What we learned

We learned how to use Android Studio to develop an Android app, specifically how to create different activities and layouts. We also learned how to use Google's Firebase database to store and work with user profile information.

What's next for Homees

We weren't able to implement all our originally intended ideas over the course of the hackathon, but we really like the concept and plan on improving on it. Some additional features include creating study groups based on classes and time availability and providing interaction ideas like question starters and online games.