In high school, one of our group members got connected with his veteran Hall in his hometown and began volunteering for many of the veterans. He quickly realized that they undergo many issues in their day-to-day life and around the house because of their older age and disabilities. However, he was the only one doing this in his community. We wanted to build a platform to give access to veterans for services that they deserve after serving our country, and VETERING does just that.
VETERING Allows Veterans to post volunteering opportunities through our cross-platform application and through an automated call system powered by AWS Connect and Lex. Students will be able to see all of the volunteering opportunities and earning accredited volunteering hours through he SLO Veterans Hall.
We built VETERING with React Native native for our frontend, Amazon Lex and Connect for our chat/ai feature, and DynamoDB/Lambda/Cognito for our backend. By synchronizing multiple AWS tool and technologies our workflow was smooth and straightforward.
While building our application, a large problem we ran into was creating a phone number for our AWS lex to transfer data to our database. Because this was a new platform to us, we had no familiarity with troubleshooting but we're thankfully aided by the mentors from the Cal Poly DX hub. In order to integrate our AWS connect and lex system to our database, we needed to use a lambda function but unfortunately ran out of time before we could link the two up. However, the call center still works and the data is being stored through aws, it just doesn't talk to our database currently.
Our group is most proud of the fact that we are proud of our projects. We believe this can make a large impact on our community and think our idea is unique and can drive a change within San Luis obispo. Additionally, we all learned new skills and participated in our first hackathon and are proud to say we built a product we are excited to present.
The major thing we learned during this hackathon is that a team must be made up of specialized roles in order to succeed. Our designer is mostly focused on our user experience while the builder was developing our back end and database. Our advocator was focused on navigating the competition and bringing in advice from mentors and sponsors. However all three of us needed to be communicating with each other towards one common goal, and everyone they're part of the puzzle together.
We are excited to keep developing our application and connecting the functionality of AWS connect and lex in order to bring more functionality to the user. Additionally, we would love to solidify a partnership with a SLO VETS hall to confirm volunteer hours for students on campus, bringing more people to the platform.
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