Inspiration
Being from New York City provided inspiration for our project to connect refugees with resources and local communities. NYC is home to people from all walks of life, many of whom are immigrants and refugees who face unique challenges in navigating their new environments. Witnessing the strength of these communities and the importance of support systems in helping individuals thrive sparked the idea for our platform. We wanted to create a space where refugees could easily find resources and connect with others, despite any language or cultural barriers.
What it does
RefuConnect welcomes two distinct user groups: refugees and employees of refugee camps. Refugees can create accounts, granting them access to an auto-translated chatroom where they can communicate with other refugees in nearby camps, regardless of language differences. This feature fosters a larger, more diverse hub of people from whom they can seek assistance, creating a stronger sense of community. On the other hand, employees of refugee camps can log in to view requests made by refugees, enabling them to provide aid more efficiently and make critical resources more accessible in a timely manner.
How we built it
We built this application by using ReactJS with Node.js as the framework. In addition, we used Express.JS to set up the back-end server, all connected to a MongoDB Database.
Challenges we ran into
One challenge I ran into was setting up the chat feature as I could not get two people to be connected and be able to send messages to each other. To tackle this bug I used and leveraged online resources and tools to get to the conclusion that the issue was surrounding incorrect setting up and use of the API.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
One accomplishment in particular that we are proud of was how we divided the tasks and used version control (GItHub) to communicate and perform the software development of the project in a well-timed, efficient, and appropriate manner.
What we learned
During this project and hackathon we learned how Wireframing and pre-planning can be very handy when it comes to developing software especially at this scale. This led to us being able to create the project and deploy it in time and meeting all the requirements and criteria that we wanted to meet. Moreover, we learned how to leverage our software engineering skills that we learned from previous internships and school work to deploy and create this full-stack web application.
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