Mia

Mentorship is one of the most powerful strategies to decrease the gender gap in tech. But how can we do a better job of providing support?

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Inspiration

Mentorship should be more than taking someone out for coffee, or discussing their future with them for a couple hours. We want to be able to be there for a mentee when she needs it most. The late nights, when she’s stuck, frustrated or dejected. How can we be there to support her at that moment? Inspired by the old Microsoft Office assistant, our team created Mia, the Mentorship Inclusivity Assistant.

What it does

A virtual assistant that stores encouraging words, tips and advice from mentors, and makes this information available from mentees when they most need, right on their desktop.

A mentor has the option to create 'Notes' (non-technical words of advice) which are sent to their mentee during important or stressful periods such as a late night or their first day of work.

The mentor can also create 'Tips' or tutorials that help mentees debug errors. The Google Vision API is used to identify the error from a screen shot uploaded by a mentee. The error is then matched with an existing tutorial made by a mentor.

How we built it

Visual Studio C# (Winform) for the front end with a local SQL database. Node.js to handle the Google Vision API with a connection to the Winform via the .NET WebRequest Class.

Figma to design the cute animated character Mia and Krita to animate her.

Challenges we ran into

Picking a tech stack none of us were very experienced with! We learned a lot about developing in C#, incorporating external APIs in C#, and graphic design and animation.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Making a working prototype in 24 hours.

What's next for Mia

Connect to a web database instead of a local database. Test the mentor-mentee user experience by application running on multiple machines. Improve the graphics and animation.

SCRIPT TIMESTAMPS: App Description: 00:51 Impact: 00.33 Given More time; 4:29 Greatest Challenge: Cut out of video. Working with an unfamiliar tech stack. We overcame it by working together and consulting the internet.

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