Stepping Stone

Inspiration

Homelessness has been an issue that continues to rise. City governments continue to find ways to provide the less fortunate with food, shelter, and clothing. We saw that there was a lack of resources in equipping them with the education and knowledge to develop themselves to be fully independent in society. We want to create a solution based on remote learning for the less fortunate to learn the knowledge necessary to personally develop and grow into a person who can thrive in the current society and economy.

What it does

Stepping Stone is a website for the homeless to enable themselves with the right tools to learn about topics such as financial literacy, social etiquette, creating an e-mail, and a local resource hut finder to locate the nearest homeless shelter, food bank, thrift store, and more. There is also a feature for them to create an account via Gmail for more personalized content, access to scheduling Zoom Meetings with mentors, and other tools necessary to further succeed.

How we built it

First, we created a mockup on Figma. Then, we developed our front-end using the React.js framework, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Lastly, we connected our React.js app to Google Firebase where we implemented our database schema and user authentication.

Challenges we ran into

With a team lacking in web development and coding experience in general, properly learning how to use and implement CSS was difficult when our Figma mockup was so detailed and beautiful. There was a limitation on how technical to make the website because our target audience being homeless people.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being a team of misfits from different backgrounds, we made the drive up to College Station all the way from Houston. We have a MIS major, Entrepreneurship major, CS major, and a pre-Optometry student. Regardless, we have a common interest for wanting to do social good and were all passionate about creating a solution to help the less fortunate. We're proud to say that we came together, learned a lot of new things about software development, and made some amazing memories at all of our first-ever in-person hackathon!

What we learned

We learned a lot about web development in general as we never made a website from scratch before. It was fun trying to implement the UI/UX mockup on Figma into React.js with CSS. We also learned a lot about connecting a Google Firebase to a React.js

What's next for Stepping Stone

We would love to pursue Stepping Stone as a non-profit. We have the idea and vision for the website but we need more technical talent and skill in web development to truly bring our vision to life. We hope to provide free tools for the less fortunate to develop themselves into fully independent and functioning people.