Studdy Buddy

Inspiration

Making friends online during the pandemic has felt difficult to navigate especially when considering how new this manner of reaching out and getting to know others can be.
Many new college students report feelings of loneliness. This concern can be amplified for students of online colleges, who may worry that their choice to pursue an online degree will mean that they are “going at it alone.” As McMaster's community gradually returns to in-person learning in the following weeks, many students continue experiencing such loneliness due to their inability to grow meaningful new friendships within their programs. Such isolation currently felt by students appears to be contributing significantly towards declining mental health.

What it does

Studdy Buddy is a multi-purpose IOS phone application for McMaster Students which finds and connects you with other students going down the same career path as you or taking the same courses as you. A Study Buddy is someone you study alongside with, offering each other mutual support, discussing concepts and working together on quizzes and assignments and more importantly a friend! Studdy Buddy provides students with the freedom to choose to be paired with a Studdy Buddy or to find a Studdy Buddy Group. Our Studdy Buddy pairing algorithm will pair two students searching for a Studdy Buddy taking in the same course. Once two students have successfully paired, our application allows them to start a chat with one another to discuss availability to meet and personal information. Our Studdy Buddy map feature will reveal the location of students on campus searching for a Studdy Buddy group taking in the same course.

How we built it

Chat: Node.js, socket.io, express.js, react-native, javascript. Email-Verification: Node.js, express.js, node-mailer, firebase, javascript. Maps: react-native, react-native-maps, expo-maps, apple-maps, MongoDB, javascript. User-Authentication: firebase, javascript. General front-end: react-native.

Challenges we ran into

Deployment of the application to the app store was difficult due to the time constraints. Additionally, using new technologies for the first time during the hack-a-thon often posed some issues when debugging/testing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Overall we are proud of our ability to seamlessly implement and integrate all of our features regardless of the time constraints, as each team member worked on drastically different components of the application and it required critical and problem-solving skills for integration.

What we learned

We learned various new frameworks/libraries, platforms, databases technologies as well as the importance of communication and time management when working on a project of such magnitude.

What's next for Studdy Buddy

We plan to deploy Studdy Buddy very soon! Also, Studdy Buddy is targeted solely at McMaster Students; however, we plan to integrate more universities in the future. Additionally, we plan to improve our UI/UX as well as improve upon safety features as due to the time constraints perfecting our application was difficult.