Inspiration
With the theme of staying at home, we began to think of creative ways that we could encourage people to stay indoors, while maintaining the experiences in which we no longer have access to due to the Covid outbreak. One of these experiences was the random yet exciting moments of running into friends at school during our passing periods. These simple, but random encounters often kept us in contact with various people whom we often don't have time to keep in touch with. With coronavirus taking these spontaneous moments away, we wanted to do something to bring back this random contact during a social pandemic.
What it does
This app essentially takes a list of your contacts, and whenever we are free or in the mood for a "passing period", we can let the app know that we are available. This app will find or let you know when your other friends are in a "passing period" as well, and will create a funny random scenario for you two to bump into each other, and serve as a funny conversation starter to kick it off. The app should ideally present you with a link to your messages or messaging app of choice and bring back the spontaneity of bumping into your friends again.
How I built it
We built this app using mainly Android Studio. Working in Java which was a bit more familiar language for some of our group members compared to other methods of mobile development, we implemented several modules as well as using Android Studio's android emulator to bring together an app from scratch, with none of our team members having any prior experience or knowledge of Android Studio at all.
Challenges I ran into
With no prior mobile development knowledge there were many loops our team has to jump through. Deciding on what platform and setting it up was a challenge on its own. Our time was spent looking things up and watching various videos and reading various forums. In addition, most of our team lacked knowledge in any Java, but with collaboration between everyone we managed to figure most of our problems out.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We are definitely proud of ourselves for coming together and making an app for the first time. This is our first hackathon and it was a really great learning experience. Most importantly, we're proud of our dedication and commitment to this experience. Coding for 12 straight hours is not the easiest thing to do, but we kept it together and persevered.
What I learned
We learned a few new skills including Java and Android Studio. We used these new skills to aid us in building an app that is capable of helping many people. I think we learned a lot about what it might be like to work in a group environment on a real-world application. It was definitely a struggle and hours of staring at a computer screen to try and figure out why the code wasn't working, but we are excited to tackle another hackathon with our new skills and more experiences.
What's next for Passing Period.
We hope to implement many more features to increase the app’s ability to connect people and maintain social interactions. Some of our ideas include a friend’s list that will allow for friends to add each other in mutual agreement, and allowing people to create personal profiles. In addition, it would allow people to “run into each other” live and allow these people to connect and chat through built in chat and calling features. Another feature, we would love to implement is to be able to import friends from other social media friend’s lists as well as being able to connect your google calendars so that you may have surprise connections during the times that you are free. We understand that it is difficult to stay connected with all your friends during quarantine, but we hope this app will open opportunities for people to be able to reach out to one another and even to those who you don’t necessarily feel close to but will have the potential to bond with through this app.
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