Internnect App

Inspiration

Internnect, a local internship program founded by Mangini Associates, approached us about developing an app to help manage their teams and keep everyone informed.

What it does

The Internnect App allows for students to be grouped into teams by an administrator and for that administrator to post announcements and add to a calendar.

Students are able to interact with just their team, looking for important announcements and calendar items, as well as participating in a team chat screen to communicate with each other.

How we built it

We first started out by creating a reminder and calendar system that allowed admins to post reminders and important dates for students (no need to sign up). We then created a system that manages accounts, where students have to sign up and log in to the app as a member in a group by signing up with a code that the admin had given them from the group managing system that we have developed. Then, we created a system that allows students to communicate through a group chat, based off of the team codes given by the admin. Students can only communicate with students in their groups. Our last step was to create a web view of the website and a tab that views the user's profile.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was that the tiny web db in MIT app inventor was too small for our post system. The reminder, calendar, account system, and group chat suffered many problems because of this. The tiny web db made it impossible to store data because it would clear data often.

Another challenge that we ran into was inventing a technique that allowed the admin to post reminders, since MIT app inventor didn't give us the ability for us to do that. We managed to invent a way to get around that and use a database with a counter system that added numbers to a tag every time a post was made. The counter system allowed the posts to be organized on top of each other. After creating the reminder tab, we were able to create the calendar, group chat, and account system, by applying similar techniques the reminder's.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our successful techniques that never existed before, we developed this app without using any references from any other app inventor developer. It was difficult for us to develop our techniques, but eventually it led to the completion of our app which made us very proud of our handwork.

What we learned

We learned the functionality of how apps have such systems as an account system, log in system, and chats. We also became more knowledgeable of mobile app development.