Inspiration
Many people in this world lack mobility so we were inspired to create a tool that allows them to reach out and find someone who can be their arms and legs.
What it does
Lend-a-Hand is an online tool for people who need assistance due to various reasons. It can be utilized by the elderly, those who are injured, or those with mobility restrictions. However, Lend-a-Hand is not limited to these people; anyone can use our tool. Our main goal with creating this service was to tackle issues with the current climate surrounding the COVID-19 situation affecting people globally. However, our focus is to provide assistance to those in Canada by allowing users to create “tasks” that are essentially the equivalent of a physical posting that you might find on a community board. These tasks can be taken by the volunteers who are able to make accounts for themselves. The volunteers can then view the list of tasks posted on the listings page to view and potentially accept the tasks that they are able to complete. The user who posted the task can provide information such as: the title of the task, a description of the task, their contact information, and the approximate location of the task. The volunteer can then contact the poster and get in touch with them to make sure they are right for the job. If they are accepted, the poster can leave a review and star rating on the volunteer’s page so that future posters can be aware of the person who wants to accept their task. Once the poster has found an appropriate volunteer for their task, they can mark the task completed and it will no longer show up on the listings page. Our primary goal with creating this web application was to bring mobility for those who cannot necessarily do so for themselves. We wanted to create a sense of community during these hard times. However, this web application would not only apply during this pandemic, it would be applicable for all the time. Ideally, it would be regional based to further strengthen the community feeling that is created by volunteering. In Ontario, it is mandatory for high school students to accumulate 40 hours of volunteer work. Therefore, this service is the ideal place to find volunteer work that would make this process significantly easier. Also, as everyone knows, volunteering can lead to various networking possibilities which can then lead to potential job opportunities down the road, hence, furthering the sense of community that we are trying to promote. We believe that our submission is a good candidate for the Google Cloud challenge and the Most Innovative Hack against COVID-19 due to the utilization of Google Firebase and providing a helpful solution to those in need during these trying times. We were able to make use of Google Firebase’s databases and application management in order to maintain our web app. Our application could provide a solution to those who cannot go out and help themselves. Therefore, our volunteering app should be considered a good contender for these two challenges.
How we built it
We built this web application using HTML, CSS, JS, Firebase and FireStore. We divided into teams to focus on the front-end and back-end of the website and worked to integrate both sides cohesively.
Challenges we ran into
The digital hackathon made communication very difficult and resulted in long periods of time where we were unsure who was working on which tasks. Whenever we ran into errors or bugs it would take a long time to
Accomplishments that we are proud of
The authentication process works with Google Firebase/Firestore and can recognize which user is signed into the website.
What We learned
We learned that communication is key when building any project and it is very important to make sure all team-members share a clear vision of the final product. It can be difficult to work remotely but all things improve when communication is streamlined.
What's next for LendAHand
Setting up the custom postings would be the next key function we would like to add
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