PaperClip

Ice breakers have always been an awkward experience -- paperclip focuses on building connections one link at a time

Comment

Inspiration

As we are coming out of the pandemic, in person communication has become more difficult with traditional icebreakers being the most awkward aspect of meeting new people. Paperclips serves to help this weak link in communication, one connection at a time.

What it does

Paperclips is a mobile game app that is designed to help facilitate conversation between individuals and help build more than surface level connections. Taking a different approach than the typical tell me about yourself, Paperclips forces more interesting and deeper conversations to help foster a stronger connection.

How we built it

Paperclip is a full-stack development project. It utilizes React-native for front-end, Flask for back-end, and MongoDB for databases. It uses ngrok for hosting.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into several challenges while developing Paperclip. One major challenge we encountered was that while our team had experience working in front-end with React-native, we had little experience with back-end development and flask, thus we had to spend a lot of time figuring it out. Probably the single largest struggle we had was properly integrating our front and back end together as we had little to no experience doing it. In particular we all had very little knowledge about sockets with Flask, and as such we had to find a different solution for bi-communication between the host and client.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud of the Paperclip and the quality of the product we have produced. Even though for most of us this was our first experience with a full-stack project, we were able to produce a product of such high quality.

What we learned

Paperclip was a massive learning experience for us. Through the project, we had to learn a lot about back-end development and how to work with flask. In addition, we also utilized Figma for the first time to plan out of project and the workflows for our software.

What's next for PaperClip

Although Paperclip has come so far, we still have a lot we want to accomplish for the project. There were a lot of features we wanted to implement that we simply didn't have time for, such as different icebreaker activities or more features to better facilitate communication between people.

Share this project:

Updates