Project NaVi

homepage, chat page, page for study tips

Inspiration

Between hard lockdowns, travel bans, and turbulent political discourse, this year has been difficult for everyone, especially uni students.

Having experienced our own struggles and seeing our friends' struggle in isolation and suffer from growing cynicism, we wanted to make something that could stitch together an intimate community and make up for the relationships we couldn't have on campus.

What it does

Project NaVi is a website built to help domestic and international uni students form the on-campus relationships this pandemic has deprived them of and improve their wellness while in and beyond isolation. There are 3 primary features:

The Library - a digital space where you can study collaboratively in a small group of uni students from a choice of faculties

The Cafe (not in MVP) - a space for users to take a break and bond with the people they’ve met to build relations that go beyond the platform

Student Help - a student help blog where we as the developers refer our users to credible articles and utilities that can help maximise productivity and promote a healthy work/life balance

How we built it

The program is written in HTML, html5, and CSS. The UI/UX Design was made using Figma to give a visual representation of our code.

First, our team members worked independently to build each of the three webpages - the home page, library page, and student help page - on the first day of the hackathon.

We then proceeded to link the webpages together and spend the rest of the hack polishing our UI/UX Design to best represent our vision of what this project could look like.

We also decided on other features we could implement later on into our MVP to demonstrate the potential for this product.

Challenges we ran into

TIME. This being our first hackathon, we were challenged by the time constraints to ideate, iterate and prepare a pitch for our project so we couldn't polish it as much as we'd like.

Since we were not well versed in HTML, this hackathon was a massive crash course in improving our understanding and seeing what's possible with this language. We wanted to implement a working microphone and video conferencing feature but this proved to be something we could not overcome in this short time period.