Mentor Me

Mentor Me Logo

Inspiration

Mentor Me, a social media application for students who are looking for guidance and mentorship from other students who are in higher years of the same program. Inspired by the mentors from Sheridan College’s Hackville 2024, along with the hackathon theme of “newcoming”, our team decided to build a social media website for students who are looking for educational advice and wisdom from students in the same program but a higher year of study.

What it does

Users can create an account that include their program and their year of study. The user’s feed shows them other students in the same program but different years, and users are able to request to connect with them and message them using our chat system.

How we built it

Our website is a full-stack application using React and Bootstrap frameworks for the front-end, and Node.js and Express.js for the backend. Our application uses MongoDB to store user accounts and messages.

Challenges we ran into

For majority of our team, it was our first time using React in a full-stack application, so we had a lot of difficulty even developing the front-end of the website. We also tried to use Firebase for our application but it was too difficult, so we ended up switching to MongoDB instead. Also, none of us are designers so we all had difficulty designing a nice looking website with CSS and Bootstrap. LOL

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have developed an entire full-stack application in just one weekend, especially since for half of our team, its‘ their first time ever developing a full application! Even though the website at submission is not visually pretty, we were able to have functional logins and almost-functional chat messaging system.

What we learned

We learned how to develop with React in a single weekend and we all can confidently say we are a lot more comfortable with it now compared to the beginning of the hackathon. Our team also got comfortable working collaboratively with multiple people, and we also learned how to properly use GitHub collaboratively as well. We also learned started learning how to use Bootstrap with React.

What's next for Mentor Me

If we had more time and proper designs and wireframes, we would clean up the UI for our website. We also would like to eventually implement a system that scans your schedule and finds other students who have the same classes. We’d also like to implement microservicing in the future as well.

Built With

Submitted to

Hackville 2024
- Winner Best Use of MongoDB Atlas

Created by

I helped with the front-end! I was able to practice working with React components and even got to experiment with Bootstrap frameworks.

Czarina Santos
I worked on the front end of Mentor Me using React JS. It was my first time ever learning the library so it was definitely a challenge at first. But, slowly I became accustomed to it realized how much I can do with it.

Mayamba Boka-Mbambu
I worked on the front end of MentorMe using React for the first time. I found it quite intuitive and really enjoyed learning how to use components and array.map() to produce multiple DOM elements quickly.

Ashton Sicard
I worked on the back-end. I learned how to collaborate with the frontend to structure the backend. While I did struggle with firebase and eventually gave up, I learned how versatile mongoDB is, after innovating our systems to integrate with the serverless database.

Jacob Angga