MentorMe

Inspiration

As black women who have personally experienced the challenges of pursuing a career in tech, we know first-hand the importance of having a mentor who can provide guidance and support. This is why MentorMe is so important to us. I remember when I was younger, I was often told that computer science was a male-dominated field and not a suitable career path for me as a girl. If I had a mentor who looked like me with similar aspirations and experiences would have made my journey much easier. MentorMe aims to connect people from underrepresented groups especially black women with experienced mentors who can help guide them through the industry and overcome any obstacles they may face. By providing this support, we hope to encourage more black women to pursue careers in tech.

What it does

MentorMe is a mobile application that connects mentors and mentees from all over the world in a safe and user-friendly environment. The app offers a variety of resources, tools, and features to help users find and connect with experienced mentors in their field of interest, seek guidance and support, and track their progress over time. Some of the features of the app could include mentor matching, a feedback System - mentors and mentees converse with text and video, by asking questions and receiving text or video responses , and MeTokens which is a point-based reward system for active engagement. Overall, the goal of the MentorMe app is to empower and inspire lifelong learning and personal growth through the power of mentorship.

How we built it

We built the app using flutter. We chose to use flutter because we knew this was going to be an app that we would want on multiple platforms, including iOS, and android. We utilized several flutter packages such as their image picker package, their video player, package, and their HTTP converter package. In addition to developing with flutter, we decided to use firebase to save the posts and the information attached to each post. We use this using Google firebase database and created a database for our app. Finally, we used open AI to help. Give suggestions of other posts to have been posted in the past by people that are looking for a specific question. Open AI also is set to be used to generate terms for the more specific subcategories under the topics.

Challenges we ran into

Xcode is having issues with their new iOS 16 update. This delayed us because the platform we were using flutter runs on iOS and because we weren't able to access flutter as much as we needed to. Our product wasn't as visually appealing as we would have liked. But given the circumstances we are proud of what we were able to accomplish and would like top further the project when apple fixes their update.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Reinstalling firebase and getting open Ai to work on flutter are huge accomplishments for us.

What we learned

We learnt more about how to integrate APIs, use third-party libraries, and manage user data securely. We also learnt more about User experience design.