Receiving a notification from the app.
Home page with the task for the day.
Exploring friend past tasks.
Uploading page.
Looking back at your own tasks by date.

Touch grass

A way to go out to explore and meet others.

Inspiration

Throughout the past few years, for those who use social media, one issue that arises is not knowing how to post or one has nothing to post. So we wanted to create a platform that will include and promote a wider range of engagement for those who want to interact more with their peers socially but have been feeling this way.

We wanted to center this app around students at university campuses to connect them with their peers.

Additionally, with the busy schedules of many college students, some don’t make time to do other activities, and we wanted to have a feature that will also encourage them to take a break with an activity to do.

What it does

Everyday, users that are students at the same institution will receive a notification for a task to be completed and posted within the next 24 hours. For example, these tasks may include, “Go to your favorite spot on campus!” or “Go on an outdoor walk” and users will upload a photo of them completing this task, which will be made available for others at their school to view and comment on.

One special features is that because the posts are limited to students of the same university, there will be bonus tasks that are related to any events happening on campus that day, to also encourage students to “touch grass” and have the opportunity to engage more with their community at school.

How we built it

We started off by brainstorming how an app can improve our everyday life. We then started working on design through Figma. After getting our prototype, we started to build it out in React.

Challenges we ran into

None of our team members had experience with UI design or using Figma, so it took some time to understand how to use the tools provided in Figma to create designs that were intuitive and easy to use for our users. Throughout the process of building our app, we also encountered several issues with pushing and merging our code to GitHub. Most of our team members also had minimal to no experience using React prior to this hackathon, so it took longer at times for us to code out what we wanted.

Accomplishments we're proud of

We are proud of being able to learn how to use the features in Figma to design our project. Some of us were also able build our understanding on HTML, CSS, and JS, and how they work together to create an app.

What we learned

How to use the features of Figma and React.

What's next

First, we would work on implementing the backend server using some kind of database to hold and return all days' posts. Then, for features, we'd like to replace the upload post option with a camera option so students will be required to complete the task the day it's given rather than uploading a past image. Additionally, we would like to have a way for users to add friends and be able to choose to share their content with their smaller circle of friends (rather than to everyone at their institution), as not everyone may be comfortable sharing certain photos publicly.