SideQuest

University life can be overwhelming, and making meaningful connections often feels like high-stakes commitment. Clubs and societies usually require students to attend regularly, stay active in group chats, and wait days or weeks for events to happen. We wanted to create something lighter — something that happens daily, feels casual, and lets students engage without the pressure to "keep showing up."

That’s how SideQuest was born: a playful platform that delivers small, personalized "micro-experiences" students can jump into anytime. Instead of boring forms or endless club sign-ups, SideQuest uses a gamified onboarding — a fun series of "Would You Rather?" questions that quietly build a personality profile in the background. Based on their answers, students get matched to SideQuests tailored to their vibe, not just their schedule.

We built SideQuest with React.js, Vite, Firebase, and VS Code. Each answer in the onboarding links to hidden personality tags like "creative," "outdoorsy," or "social," and each SideQuest is similarly tagged. Our custom personality-to-quest matching engine then recommends experiences that genuinely fit who the student is.

One major challenge was merging code across different branches — onboarding, matching, and feedback loops were built in parallel, causing a few conflicts when integrating. But with strong team communication, we debugged and solved these quickly. We also faced scrappy conditions making our demo video without professional gear — but the final result still captured the heart and creativity of SideQuest.

We’re incredibly proud of how SideQuest turns casual social discovery into a game — and how it respects that not all students want intense, high-pressure commitments to belong.

Going forward, we’d love to expand SideQuest with adaptive learning: the more quests a student completes and rates, the better our system gets at matching them with new experiences they’ll love.