SoulHaven

Inspiration

"What mental health needs is more sunlight, more candor, and more unashamed conversation."

—Glenn Close

In today’s society, mental health struggles are on the rise, and students are feeling more and more isolated with their problems due to inauthentic online sharing spaces. These struggles were aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic, making all of us its victims. It was only during this time that we realized the gravity of the situation and felt the urge to do something about it. This hackathon provided us with the opportunity to realize our dreams

What it does

We provide students with an authentic anonymous sharing website where students can share their own struggles with mental health and hear about the struggles of others. It serves as a safe space where students, when feeling overwhelmed by their emotions, can lower their guard and express themselves without the fear of being judged or feeling vulnerable. Here are the main features our website offers:

Anonymous form where students can share their stories to a form and it auto-populates responses onto the website
Page to display mental health resources & crisis helplines
Mood assessment quizzes which provides users with resources based on their responses

How we built it

The hackathon's tight 48-hour timeline prompted us to embrace an agile workflow. We allocated tasks across our team and executed short sprint cycles with periodic integration to to monitors the product's development. Brainstorm We had a heart-to-heart conversation about our struggles and brainstormed a common solution to it. Implementation Our team used a variety of technologies to bring our vision to life throughout implementation. We took use of Google Sites' user-friendly interface, smoothly incorporated dynamic features using Google Apps Script, and refined the visual presentation with HTML. This combination of platforms not only sped up development but also offered a consistent and compelling user experience. Verification Peer-tested functionalities of our website and provided recommendations.

Challenges we ran into

We jumped into the project with zeal, but were met with early setbacks due to a rushed approach that lacked a defined strategy. Despite our inexperience, we chose to try out AppScript, a new programming language that proved to be more complicated than anticipated and were quickly humbled down by the number of bugs we encountered, reminding us of the task's difficulty. Nonetheless, these challenges served as a source of learning for us, speeding up our development and giving us with new skills.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learned a new scripting language
Learned how to use google sites
Built our first website
Integration and embedding of different platforms

What we learned

"Our journey provided us with invaluable takeaways." We not only tried out new coding languages, increasing our technical repertoire, but we also learned a lot about mental health. This endeavour broadened our understanding of the subject, emphasizing the significance of empathy and assistance. Furthermore, we learned the value of meticulous planning prior to execution, which led to enhanced efficiency and efficacy in our efforts.

What's next for SoulHaven

Here's how we plan to expand our website:

Live chat rooms where students can talk with each other
Replies to posts so people with similar experiences could empathize with each other
Language translations for greater inclusivity
AI simulations for enhancing user engagement and providing personalized experiences such as support chat bots and virtual reality relaxation environments.