MeltingPot

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Inspiration

Our team consisted of members from multiple different cultural backgrounds. Each member had expressed interest in learning more about another's language and culture, prompting us to create a more seamless way of learning new languages. Apps like Duolingo and Rosetta Stone had provided good starting points but always left us wishing for a more realistic and interactive language learning experience. Thus, MeltingPot was born...

What it does

MeltingPot allows anyone around the world to learn a new language in a simple yet effective manner.

How we built it

We used Android Studio with Kotlin to create our app. Firebase Realtime Database was used to store app data and ML Kit by Google was used for language translation.

Challenges we ran into

This was the first hackathon project that each member of our group had worked on. Initial setup of our development environments took longer than anticipated, postponing the start of our work. We weren't previously familiar with most of the technology we were working with throughout the duration of this project.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Producing an MVP in a minimal amount of time was a great accomplishment for our group. Most of the core functionality that we had set out to create was implemented by the time of this posting. We also learned quite a bit in a short amount of time, leaving us with new skills and ideas for the future. Given that this was the first hackathon project that each member of the group had participated in, we were proud of the amount of work that we accomplished.

What we learned

Many of our members were experiencing Android/mobile development for the first time. While this presented challenges, our team did a great job learning from the ground up and developing an MVP with the key features we set out to create. In future projects, it would be beneficial to start with a solidified idea of what our project goal is and have a deeper understanding of the tech stack we wish to use.

What's next for MeltingPot

Three key features we would like to implement in the future: 1) Location Services: Allowing users to change the overall range/distance of those they interact with to better reflect their current location or a location of their choice. (Example: Interacting with Spanish speakers in your local area or interacting with Spanish speakers who live in a Spanish-speaking country) 2) One-on-One Interaction: One of the features that many language apps lack is one that allows personal interaction between individuals. We hope to implement a feature like this in the future to allow a more personal experience for users of the app. 3) UI Language Matching: Our app is currently intended for users in the United States (a primarily English-speaking country). We would like to edit our UI to change depending on the individual user's native language, leading to a smoother user experience.