Inspiration
Our team discussed the lack and difficulty of connectivity for students. We discussed about how popular apps such as Tinder and Bumble are dating apps designed for people to meet each other, but what about an app for students that need a study buddy? Or a study group ?
According to the Cigna Loneliness index, Gen Z is the loneliest generation: 71% of Gen Z feels at a loss for connectivity and isolation. To combat this, StudyBuddy.tech is designed to integrate socializing but with a purpose: academics. Recent research regarding collaborative study methods shows higher academic success rates amongst students versus students studying alone (Cen et al., 2014).
In summary, StudyBuddy.tech is designed to gear students towards creating connective relationships in a productive manner.
What it does
Our app allows users to login or signup to see all study groups available... Additionally, they can enter a room and see all the users in this study group and chat with them as well. A user can also navigate to their profile page to see what study groups they're in.
How we built it
Our front end is built with ReactJS and our backend is built with MongoDB and Node.
Challenges we ran into
One of our members had difficultly with environmental problems with VScode not opening up our project, we had bizarre git flow errors were we almost lost branches, authentication for login and sign up for the user (JWT) was difficult to incorporate as we used React Hooks or local state instead of global state (this made it difficult to pass information to other components), incorporating the react-messenger package for users to chat to each other, CSS styling, UI/UX, etc.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Our team is proud of building a fullstack hosted app FROM SCRATCH in a day; currently, Andre is located in Brazil at the moment, while Santiago is in Florida and I (Crystal) am in Seattle. Our team collaborated on the fly while not only working with the HackKU deadlines and expectations, but managing and encouraging creativity while working with different time zones... Although we don't have most of the functionality we were aiming for, we built an application from scratch in 1 day with error handling for the user login and sign up, user chat messaging, database modeling/relationships, multiple API calls, JWT/authentication, functionality for global state and local state storage, incorporating logic, navigation and routes set up, a hosted backend and an almost complete frontend... while these are laborious tasks for one team to do in a week, we, three strangers across the globe were able to make it happen.
What we learned
All three of us learned different coding styles and techniques from each other; all of us can code in reactJS, but we all code so differently... While collaboration strengthens the learning experience, exposure to our individual differences has shed some light for areas of personal improvement and goals.
What's next for StudyBuddy.tech
We would like to style the frontend a little better, incorporate linking and other apps as well, more functionality for the user, login with social media or other account credentials, etc.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.