PAIR 'EM

Inspiration

As a group of computer science and engineering students at Santa Clara University, we came together with the intention of making a website that can help little guys. Considering the lack of accessibility to healthcare, education, and resources in America, we decided upon a platform that increased accessibility all three, with no cost to the user.

What it does

Pair'Em is a platform built around the goal of making education more accessible to the general public. Pair'Em's purpose is to connect people in need of general advice to undergraduate and graduate students, majoring in the area of expertise. This offers up-to-date personalized information from credible highly-educated students to people looking for free advice. Additionally, it gives students the opportunity to tackle some irrevocable practice hours in the industry they will be entering after graduation.

How we built it

We used HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Firebase to code the program.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many challenges. Firstly, Monica and Reiko attempted to work with Auth0, but because of many errors and confusion, we decided to scrap the idea and look into other options. We tried multiple times to get the code working but it was just not appearing on the website. Secondly, on the backend, Meagan and Mandy experienced troubles trying to get the connection between Firebase and our HTML serves. Thankfully, it started working and we got an amazing database to store the user's information.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're really proud of Mandy and Meagan for figuring out how to globally store data with no prior knowledge using Firebase! It took some time, but they didn't give up and figured out enough syntax to write the back-end code. We're also proud of actually completing the project! We spent nearly all 24 hours working on this, and we did our very best to make it as nice as it could be. We're also very proud of Kayleigh and Monica for winning their ultimate frisbee games and still showing up to code with us late through the night.

What we learned

Many of us learned HTML, CSS, and Javascript for the first time! Since we're all COEN and CS majors, we've only grown comfortable using the language seen in back-end programming. Although, we had to learn how this actually applies in terms of global data storage, as well as how to interact with the front-end portion of our project. In addition to back-end knowledge, after this Hack for Humanity, we're familiar with more front-end code and can now expand on our knowledge. Big thanks to Sarah for teaching us most of the front-end code!

What's next for PAIR EM

PAIR EM will definitely work on the User Interface and login system more. Once we get better and more experience with CSS and Javascript, this will be the best website ever! We hope to include a live chat feature as well as sending email and text notifications when you receive responses. It would also be a goal to keep the chat history of a the individual stored in a global database and have the ability to access past conversations.