SeniorServe

Inspiration

To come up with our app our team met multiple times to find an idea that would fit our goals and values. We wanted an app that would help our local community the most, but also a group that is not often thought about. We came up with ideas such as spreading STEM to children, helping teachers in some way, but lastly, we came upon the idea of helping out the elderly as our school is in front of an elderly care institution and we have worked with them many times. We ensured our app was innovative by trying to find ideas that would set us apart from our competitors. This is where we made a document where we brought up fun ideas that we could implement such as rewards, accessibility, donations, etc, while also getting advice from other teenagers at our school in interviews, ensuring that this advice was innovative because we directly interviewed and talked to teenagers and elderly citizens.

What it does

Our app was meaningful to address the needs of our community in a variety of ways such as providing care for elderly, volunteer hours for teens, and help for non-profit care institutions. Several elderly people face issues completing simple tasks due to age, tasks that would take teenagers minutes to complete. Several teenagers also struggle to gain hours because they are so busy and often can't make it to events or pre scheduled community service. With our app teenagers can communicate with seniors to fit their schedule and gain hours. To focus on our target users, our app also provides funds to non-profit elderly care institutions and provides incentives for volunteers as we make money through charging elderly very low prices, much cheaper than any of our competitors.

How we built it

We mainly used a website called glide to help us design our app as we didn't have a coder.

Challenges we ran into

The most significant problem our team faced throughout the process of designing our app was the loss of our primary coder. This member had helped us brainstorm our app as well as come up with ideas of how we were supposed to design and structure the app. When he left our team lead Ishaan stepped in and took his place, but he didnt know how to code, so he used the advice of our mentor and the help of Morgan and Conner and decided upon using an app called glide where he was able to design an app that did not require as much code and only required planning and designing. We also faced issues within our presentation which, the first time we made it, was over 9 minutes. Throughout this process as a team we brainstormed ideas on how to shorten sections, so we all came up with separate sections that we had watched over multiple times that were redundant or that could be sped up which allowed us to collaborate as a team and make our video less than 6 minutes long.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of first making a presentation that was able to fit in so much in such little time as well as creating an app that addresses a large issue in our communities that is often overlooked.

What we learned

Breaking down every member, Ishaan learned incredibly valuable skills in app design learning how to use data flows as well as screens for users, he learned to work with video editing in Capcut to create the presentation, and he learned how to lead a team in a way that was organized and well documented throughout the process. Conner learned how to work with everyone as a group, coming out of shell and understanding that there are no bad ideas and that any idea can benefit the team in one way or the other. Lastly, Morgan learned how to really communicate with the team and work with skills like google docs, drive, and spreads to ensure that everything for our team was kept organized and ensure that we had a plethora of outside information that was easily accessible. Throughout RSA this year all of us really learnt what it meant to be a team and work together. We learned the importance of communicating with each other, being open to all ideas, and ensuring we all had fun on top of everything.

What's next for SeniorServe

If given more time we would definitely like to make improvements on our app such as adding an additional AI component to make the interactions and matching of elderly and volunteer more seamless and personalized to increase conversion rates. This change will take into account region, interests, time availability, and much more. We also plan to implement a buddy system for people who volunteer to be able to learn from each other about how to work with elderly. Going past elderly, we plan to utilize our app to help people with disabilities as well as elderly to cater towards a larger audience. Lastly, with the advice of someone we interviewed, we plan to collaborate with senior living communities and retirement homes to create an even more seamless experience for the elderly for them to learn how to use this app to its true potential.

Built With

• glide