Sphinx

What is your chosen theme and problem statement?

Our chosen theme is Giving Back and we decided on the 1st problem statement of this theme: “Volunteering is one of the best ways to give back to our community. What creative ideas do you have to make volunteering easier, widespread, and more beneficial to those in need?”

What does your hack do?

Our hack is a mobile app that aims to serve as a one-stop outreach platform for individuals to not only be able to conveniently seek out volunteer opportunities, but also be able to easily recruit others for their very own volunteer events!

How does your hack answer the problem statement?

According to the National Volunteer and Philanthropy Centre's (NVPC) latest Individual Giving Study released in 2021 reports that Singapore’s volunteerism rate is 21%. This statistic is expected to rise as we transition to living with COVID-19, and the restrictions continue to relax.

As a result, there would be more individuals seeking out volunteering opportunities or starting such initiatives of their own! To help individuals find suitable volunteering opportunities, we would like to introduce our hack – an innovative mobile app that serves as an outreach platform for those looking to volunteer or those finding volunteers for their project.

Our app caters to two separate audience groups – individuals seeking out volunteer opportunities, and groups or organisations recruiting volunteers. By providing a one-stop outreach platform to both groups, our app increases the accessibility and makes it easier for anyone to volunteer!

For those who are seeking volunteering opportunities and ways to contribute back to our community. Our intuitive interface allows for easy and convenient ways to discover volunteering opportunities and register for them. For groups or organisations seeking to recruit volunteers for their project, the app provides instantaneous outreach to numerous other individuals looking to volunteer! The platform also allows for smaller groups e.g. volunteering projects from school, to seek out volunteers, unlike SG Cares which is mainly for well-established large organisations recruiting volunteers.

Hence, our creative hack allows for easier, more accessible and larger outreach for those in the volunteering scene in order to better help those in need.

How did you build your hack?

Our tech stack consists of Android Studio, Dart, Flutter and Firebase. Our workflow started with the conceptualisation of the idea, before we moved into prototyping the intuitive and easy to use interface. Once we finished prototyping, we dove straight into coding the mobile application. We ended off with testing our hack and ensuring that it functions as expected.

What are some difficulties you overcame?

The time constraint was something we struggled with. Having just picked up Dart, Flutter and Firebase two months ago, it wasn’t something we were very familiar nor comfortable with, so it did take some time to research and learn more about the implementation of our desired functions and relevant packages. However, we planned out our time well and stuck to our deadlines, allowing us to complete our full workflow within the 24h!

What was your biggest learning point from LifeHack 2022?

Our biggest learning point would be learning to take breaks and pace ourselves throughout the 24h time duration. Coding for long periods of time would be non-advisable and taking regular breaks throughout the time period did help in coming up solutions to the bugs and issues we encountered.