Loonion

As a Waterloo or Laurier student, how are you really? Are you stressed, sad or lonely? Don’t worry! Loonion is here to help you loo-k for meaningful relationships.

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Inspiration

We've noticed a lot of Students at Waterloo experience high levels of stress and anxiety. Oftentimes, students feel incredibly lonely and struggle to connect with their peers. That's why, we decided to create Loonion a dating hub for students to get out, have fun, and meet new and incredible people.

What it does

Loonion, in simple words, is a dating app that allows students from Waterloo and Laurier to connect with their peers. Instead of just being like any other dating app, Loonion is exclusive to students.

To use Loonion, the user has to register for an account and fill out the onboarding information as prompted. The user will also have to go through an authentication process in uploading their Student ID to prevent catfishing most commonly found in dating apps; this allows Loonion to maintain its quality in connecting solely university students.

Once the user has signed up, they can simply log in every time they wish to use Loonion. After logging in, the user will be guided to their individual profile, where their personal information like name, degree, year, and interests are displayed. This is the main screen of the app, where the user can navigate to the Connect tab to find potential partners, log in their shower count and daily mood check under the Self-Care Tracker, or edit their profile information.

Under the Connect tab, users are able to match with or pass other users using Loonion. These recommended users are generated through Loonion’s algorithm, matching users according to their partner preference, hobbies, and requirements (like age, degree, degree type and more).

Why is our project useful?

With the academically demanding and challenging curriculums Waterloo offers, many students have reported “feelings of stress and pressure due to the demanding academic workload”, more prevalent in competitive programs like computer science and other STEM degrees, which oftentimes lead to feelings of stress, anxiety, sadness and isolation. Various research suggests that strong and positive relationships can significantly alleviate feelings of loneliness and depression. Thus, Loonion perfectly caters to solve this problem– through connecting students to promote relationships, companionship, and sense of belonging.

Greater Purpose– Loonie to Love

With our Loonie to Love initiative, we are offering a loonie subscription plan, renewable annually. Playing with the name of Geesehacks–which, no doubt, is related to geese, we have proposed our Loonie to Love initiative offering a loonie subscription plan, renewable annually. The Loonie, coincidentally (or not) also has the Canadian Geese imprinted on, drawing our full circle in our project’s relatedness to the hackathon. Loonion, of course, will be a profitable app, given the high demand from sad and stressed Waterloo students. Therefore, we leveraged this advantage and decided that all proceeds will be donated to mental health causes and local non-profit organizations to support students’ mental health throughout their university journey.

How we built it

We created a responsive web page for all UI/UX components using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and built a back-end database with Python, SQL, and Flask to store all user data. For student ID verification, we incorporated Tesseract.js to process and validate uploaded IDs.

Challenges we ran into

Struggles we ran into along the way included learning how to apply new languages to our project in the limited time we had during the hackathon. We also struggled to connect the front-end and back-end components near the end of our project. Our biggest challenges were learning and implementing SQL for the database and integrating Tesseract for ID verification. Both were new to us and working under the time constraints of a hackathon made it even more intense.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud of the fact that we were able to build so much with two newcomers, and two second-time hackathon participants. We are also proud of our ability to adapt and overcome our challenges to finish the project before the deadline. We’re especially proud of how much we accomplished together as a team. Not only did we learn new tools and complete the project, but we also managed to have a great time, bond as a team, and attend almost every event—earning 3 out of 4 teammates' plushies! The teamwork and fun we had throughout the hackathon are what made this experience so much fun!

What we learned

Geesehacks has created many firsts for our team. We learned how to integrate the Tesseract.js library into our code to help extract text from images for ID verification and deepened our understanding of SQL and Flask to create and manage a database. This was also one of the first times members of our team has coded a frontend for a website, so we also learned a lot about UI/UX design through HTML, CSS and Javascript to build webpages that can interact with backend features properly.

What's next for Loonion

Our next hope is to add an official messaging system that we did not have the time to finish while making Loonion. Also, we would seek to reach out and expand Loonion to more Canadian Universities across Ontario.

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