PandemicPals

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Example of a viable group
Trying to add members of a group

Inspiration

With a pandemic going on for a year and ever-changing social rules, it's really difficult to organise anything with your friends and family. One of your mates could be self-isolating, someone could have been in contact with a person who has Covid-19, or worse one of your loved ones could have tested positive. To top it all off, this is a dynamic world and the situation one day can be completely different from the next.

To help with this, we made PandemicPals to help you check the status of your friend group before organising a meeting. We want to ease the stress of socialising in the current climate and hopefully help those who feel like they're all alone.

What it does

Each user in PandemicPals has the ability to plan a meeting of a group from a list of their current friends (also users on the app). In accordance with the guidelines, they can add up to 5 more friends in the meeting, and each time a friend is added their covid status (as registered on the app) is checked. If the friend to be added has tested positive for Covid or has been in contact with someone who has, their icons will be red or orange respectively, and you will be discouraged from going forward with this meeting. If all your friends are covid-negative, you can create a new meeting, reach out to your mates and have fun!

All previous meetings will be stored in the app, so if you see a particular group more frequently you don't have to re-create the group each time. Each new meeting is added to all the users in that group's history for two weeks, for contact tracing purposes.

How we built it

This mobile app has been built using android studio, with Java powering the backend and XML markup creating the frontend. We also connected the app to a Firebase database to keep track of new users and their covid status.

Challenges we ran into

Learning how to use firebase under a time constraint
Passing data between app frames
Implementing navigation between pages

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Having a working demo
Creating an aesthetic UI
Implementing dynamically changing pages
Being able to model our idea in code

What we learned

This has been the first android project for many of our team members, so it was a huge learning curve for us all. Our key learnings were:

creating dynamic pages that can update based on database data
creating a login/ register page to add new users and authenticate current users from database data
create a good UI to get user inputs and have a good UX
teamwork, time management and using git
learning new languages/ technical skills

What's next for PandemicPals

Initially, we would like to finish the details of the database and the meeting features, but there are several more features we would like to add:

Send notifications to all members of the group when a new group is created or if the covid status of any members change
Include a map using the GoogleMaps API so that we can give recommendations for local activities that are open for groups to visit.
Add a calendar so that users can visually see when they met up with previous groups