Orient

We know that choosing a career path can be overwhelming. We’re here to help individuals choose a career by discovering their true passions strengths and values. This is what our projects hopes to do.

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Origin

Our project truly first started when one of our team members, Zijun Zhou, began learning to use a programming language made by google for app creation called Flutter (which runs in the language dart). He loved using the software, and spent several months learning it. The software is great for coding nice UIs, which was something all of us had wanted to learn to do. After spending several months practicing in UI, Zijun told our team about the upcoming hackathon, and recommended we learn this new coding language. Our team then spent hours during the first two weeks of winter vacation learning how to code in flutter from online tutorials. Once it was time for BrebeufHX 8.0, we were ready enough to start.

Inspiration

We immediately chose the challenge given by Femmes+ en tech. We were inspired by the career quizzes we took at the end of high school which asked generalized questions to help you find a career. However, we found that those paper booklets were outdated and somewhat inaccurate, so we decided to make an improved app version with weighted scoring to help more accurately orient students onto a future career paths based on their skills, values, and interests. Additionally, we took inspiration from a challenge we worked on from a previous hackathon (NASA hackathon), which challenged us to incorporate data and provide learning resources. This inspired us to create a resources tab, to help provide information about professionals in every field mentioned in the quiz results, as well as resources on women in STEM to help promote that important inclusion area, and a final tab that provides links to organizations that can help people find jobs.

What it does

Using a set of questions on three categories : Interests, Competencies and Values, the user is given a score for each of the three categories of Humanities, Arts and Sciences. Next, by looking at the two highest scores, the user will receive a main category and a secondary category under this format : “Science and Art”. This will give the user a list of possible jobs under this category that the program recommends the user research further. Using our comprehensive resources page, the user can do so, but also access other information such as job welfare programs and women specific help and information.

Using a set of questions on three categories : Interests, Competencies and Values, the user is given a score for each of the three categories of Humanities, Arts and Sciences. Next, by looking at the two highest scores, the user will receive a main category and a secondary category under this format : “Science and Art”. This will give the user a list of possible jobs under this category that the program recommends the user research further. Using our comprehensive resources page, the user can do so, but also access other information such as job welfare programs and women specific help and information.

How we built it

To figure out the front end of the program, we decided to learn the Flutter appreciation software from scratch for this hackathon. This is done by coding in dart, a coding language that we had to spend time understanding before we could write a single line of code.

However, for the task separation between members, we found a way to drastically improve our efficiency. We were able to divide the project into 4 parts which could each have their own file (or files) in order to avoid all possible merge conflicts and simply have the files refer to each other as the final step in our process. This not only boosted our speed but it also helped us evenly distribute the workload in a way that everyone knew what they were doing.

Challenges we ran into

The first challenge was of course, learning a new software. However, the bigger challenge actually came much later during coding. We learned while working on our project that flutter does have a downside; it's really difficult to store "global" variables, and to pass data between the multiple pages created. And since our project had 4 main pages, many of them containing a couple pages of their own, this data transferring issue became a big challenge. Eventually after a few hours of research and trial and error, we found a method that can be used to store variables that become available everywhere by editing the file's launch json.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our greatest and first pride on this project honestly just comes from finishing it. This was our third hackathon as a team, but it's the first time we've managed to make a complete finished product. In previous hackathons, we were underprepared and lacking the technical skills we needed for the projects we had chosen, and though we'd worked until the last minute, we'd never managed to make a complete working product. We're so proud of ourselves for making our first ever complete hackathon entry. We're also incredibly proud of our app's UI, which we worked very hard on. Finally we are proud that we were able to make a multi-platform app, we feel that we've truly made a very cool, very useable and useful project, that really shows off how far we've all come as programmers.

What we learned

Thanks to the project that we created we have learned and improved many skills. To name a few, it seems like we have finally figured out how to effectively outline all the work that needs to be done so that it can be carried out as effectively as possible. Additionally, because we used Flutter for the very first time, this hackathon has greatly improved our competency in that field and we are now much more apt to create nicer and more user-friendly UI. Because of the nature of flutter, using it in this context also helps us understand app development more in depth because some apps that we use every day such as google classroom and ebay are coded using the very same tools that we used during this hackathon.

What's next for Orient

Thanks to this opportunity, we have once again improved our skills in programming and had lots of fun while we did it. Building a project of this calibre is a big step for us and we have no intention of stopping. We plan on continuing to improve and learn as a group by participating in more hackathons, while also using this time to form lasting memories and strengthen our bonds as friends.

We also had many ideas for what we could improve on our app if we had more time. Firstly, we'd love to improve our resources to make it include professionals in the domain that are looking for interns or willing to do mentorships, to help pair students with professionals that align with the student's result on the quiz. We'd also love to add more general things to the app, like a settings section to change colours and themes on the app. Honestly, there are so many expansions we'd love to add to Orient if given the time and opportunity.

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