UW HelpChat

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Inspiration

We recognize as students at the University of Waterloo that mental health is a serious issue. In the last 4 months, there were 2 large publicized student suicides. These occurrences constantly reinforce the idea of students not receiving the correct guidance and support during academic terms.

What it does

UW HelpChat is a chat app tailored specifically towards UW students. You cannot login unless you have verified Waterloo credentials. Once logged in, there is an option to participate in open group chats to see what others have to say as well as express your thoughts. In addition, there is an anonymous option for users that are more comfortable expressing their thoughts with being known. Finally, there is a personal chat section where users who are interested in other users expressed thoughts can request to chat with them 1 on 1 creating a more intimate connection.

How we built it

Using youtube tutorials, iOS app development, swift and firebase, it was a lot of struggling, debugging and learning on the fly. We followed an mvc design pattern and used firebase to support the backend of the app. Users, passwords, messages and media are all stored on firebase's storage and we use firebase authentication ( for now until we can figure out how to validate with uwaterloo credentials) to authenticate users.

Challenges we ran into

We knew almost nothing about iOS development going into this so almost everything was a challenge. Many of the issues arise from scraping external resource information and trying to implement it into our app, specifically finding a way to validate Waterloo students only.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud of developing a functioning app the is completely capable of having a full chat with 2 users who have the app compiled to their iOS device. For us, that is a big milestone just knowing that all the effort put in paid off.

What we learned

We learned how to do iOS development and grind with minimal amount of sleep.

What's next for UW HelpChat

We hope to pitch the idea to the University of Waterloo and see if they are interested in implementing this idea in some way. We think its important that not only the students, but the school as well take mental health seriously