McUnity

McUnity helps students easily find their class group chats prior to the start of the semester and make meaningful connections with their classmates.

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Inspiration

It is annoying and tedious having to find class messenger group chats at the start of every semester, it sometimes results in the creation of multiple group chats for the same class. Although there are alternative solutions, students often still prefer to use Facebook messenger. Since Facebook disabled the function where people can join a chat via a link, now, hundreds of students can only be added to the chat one by one through an invitation of a current group member. All of these issues may lead to miscommunication and stress, and that’s why we came up with McUnity!

What it does

At the beginning of each semester, McUnity will create a Facebook messenger group chat for each registered class. When a student creates a McUnity account using their school email and Facebook account, they will be able to add a list of their courses for that semester under their name. Then, our app will take the student’s username and other Facebook information, add them into the pre-created Facebook chats for those specific classes.

By clicking on the courses on their profile page, our app will automatically take them to the Facebook messenger group for that class, and it’s time for them to say hi to their classmates! By the end of the semester, these group chats will be automatically deleted to reduce the clutter in the users’ list of conversations.

A student can also connect with their peers by using the search function. Based on criteria such as majors, interests, and classes, McUnity will suggest a list of users, whose profiles can then be consulted.

How we built it

We started by brainstorming problems that are happening in students’ university life right now. We used our own concerns and struggles and ended up choosing to build a mobile application that would solve some of our problems. Being a group of four students, we split into two groups and split the work into two categories. The first category being the signup/login, profile and joining groups pages, and the second category being the friends matching using different filters. We built our application using Java and Android Studio.

Challenges we ran into

Time management was definitely one of the biggest challenges we ran into. Since we are located in different time zones, time difference was also a challenge we had to face. It was the first time for two of our team members to use Android Studio. They faced a bit of difficulties at first and struggled to implement the front-end of the friends matching page.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the idea we found. We managed to work and finish on time regardless of the time difference.

What we learned

-Android studio -Product development -Rapid development -Navigating through GitHub -Working on a different timezone

What's next for McUnity

We hope to be able to connect our functionalities with Facebook and the McGill student database. This will allow us to have a fully functional product.

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