IvyHack2020
The inspiration for our hackathon problem comes from our grandparents. As elderly, they struggle to use technology to communicate to their loved ones. This is a skill that many of us take for granted. Furthermore, the COVID-19 epidemic leaves them unable to meet in person with their friends and family because of their higher risk of contracting the virus. However, despite this novel pandemic, the disconnect between senior citizens and technology remains. Many senior citizens are left stuck at home and isolated, with nobody to talk to. To solve this problem, our team created SmallTalk: a simple social media platform, which matches these elderly people to people who are interested in gleaning their wisdom, learning about historical events that they lived through, or simply to make a new friend. Our platform is optimized for senior citizens, featuring big text and buttons, minimized navigation pages, and an extremely streamlined onboarding process. For example, the settings are included our profile page, to avoid an additional screen to navigate, and has many useful settings such as changing font size from within the app, light and dark mode, and private or public accounts. In terms of challenges, our team is composed of all first-time hackathon project participants with limited coding knowledge, so we did not know where to start. We spent a while brainstorming ideas for apps because we knew we wanted our project to be easy-to-use and accessible. We had an idea that we began working on until the second day; however, we had to scrap that idea once we were told about an existing app that did almost the same thing. Our team was forced to brainstorm a new idea - providing social interaction and community for senior citizens that have been either kicked out of their nursing homes or isolated to a great extent due to the current pandemic. We split the tasks between UI Design and Figma, and learned how to use Swift on XCode for the first time. We had trouble understanding github to push and pull our code, often encountering many merge conflicts. One of the members did not have a Mac to use XCode but downloaded VMware and a virtual Mac to help with the coding. The Figma team designed the UI and the Swift team coded and implemented the functions accordingly. While we are all new to everything we worked on, we learned how to talk through ideas and make constructive criticism, how to streamline workflow and work collaboratively, in addition to the technical side of our project - github flow, UI kits, Figma and Swift interactions, and design.
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