NUfriends

Inspiration

College has been a great experience for all of us and we remembered how we met in freshman year! With remote classes and activities, we talk to freshmen and found that they really wanted to meet other freshmen. However, they would be "zoomed out" and feel discouraged to join virtual meetings. Having been freshmen ourselves, we wanted to support the new members of our community and we believe that NUfriends will provide a reason to meet new friends and engage socially distanced on campus!

What it does

The app will pair students based on their college, major, or interests. After the pair is made, our friendly bot, NUoa kicks off the conversation with a tailored icebreaker and users are able to chat. Students can see other's profiles and connect through their short bio, social media links, and music!

How we built it

We are building this app with React-Native and hosting it on AWS using Amplify. We used Figma to design the front-end and GraphQL for the back-end.

Challenges we ran into

Connecting the app to the back-end was a little difficult, as we were learning about AWS and GraphQL this weekend. We all came together to discuss how we could troubleshoot this issue and we all contributed to the UI, giving and learning from feedback!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we got so far and learned a lot about how we plan to create this app. With a front-end plan and back-end hosting set-up we feel ready to continue this in the future. We overcame different challenges in the back-end and learned about different tools and libraries to make it through.

What we learned

We learned AWS Amplify, Figma, how GraphQL queries, and how to have fun doing it as a team!

What's next for NUfriends

We plan to continue this app and launch it before freshman come back on campus. For additional features outside of the chat implementation, we want to build our friendly chat bot to increase engagement and have specific questions to ask. We want to add interaction with different links so that people can see other's music gaming and art profiles. We plan to do the marketing and bring this to every freshman soon and are excited to introduce another way to meet others in an organic way!