Komma

Inspiration

As freshmen, finding out about events on campus has been really hard for us. Both if we need serious outreach related to our mental health, or just if we want to find like-minded people.

Komma acts as an all-in-one for college campuses that allows for the posting and viewing of all events by members of the school in order to both connect students, and thereby decrease student loneliness, and better connect students to campus resources for areas such as mental health.

We programmed the app with Java on Android Studio and connected it with Google Firebase for user authentication and cloud storage purposes for easy storage of events. We designed our front-end using XML.

Our two main challenges, which we weren't entirely able to overcome, was dynamically loading events onto the UI for the user to see, which caused us problems both in our XML and Java. We also had issues with fetching data from our Cloud Firestore database in Google Firebase, as we stored each event as an object and had several issues attempting to acquire the event from the storage and then parse it for the required information to send to that front-end.

A fully functional and designed user login system, a fully functional system for users to add events, and how we persevered to try to make the most out of the problems we encountered in our system that displays events to users in the UI.

We learned a lot of things, namely about creating Android interfaces (and XML), how NoSQL works, and storing data in databases and trying to retrieve it, as well as about Android app development in general.

We'd love to make this a fully developed product that is released on the Google Play and App Stores. We genuinely think that this app can help to both connect students, and thereby decrease student loneliness, as well as better connect students to campus resources.