Vole Social

Inspiration

We wanted to approach the Challenges of the Gamification as well as the Helping out the community prompts while using the Outsystems platform to develop our mobile app. Naturally we wanted to do a little game where you can meet up to do volunteer events in your community. Being a sucker for a good pun, we decided our mascot would be the Vole-unteer Vole and thus Vole Social was born.

What it does

The application is intended to create unique users who could present private social gatherings or public volunteering events to the public and or friends. It functions by placing pegs on a google map and encouraging users to participate in events to receive points, which in later iterations could be redeemed for new unique character sprites. (Current functionality does not entirely represent the extent of the application's capabilities)

How we built it

We used the Outsystems software to design the application and primarily focused our efforts on maneuvering between screens. Our events and users would be archived in 2 databases which would be called upon when events were created or dismissed. We implemented a number of animated sprites to make the interface more approachable and more "gamified". (Ultimately we were unsuccessful in writing to and reading from the databases and so these features did not make it to the demo process)

Challenges we ran into

The largest challenge we faced was working around the various knowledge bases we each came from. One CS major focused in Java, one Mechanical Nuclear Engineering major with a versatile skillset and haphazard coding practices, and one Biology major with a particular skillset in graphic design fit together about as well as sanded square pegs in slightly unrounded holes, though our skills ultimately balanced each other's nicely to make a relatively well-rounded design process. Our other major challenge was maneuvering the Outsystems software in general. The majority of our hitches and snags came from an incredibly small user base, and so a very small forum base to guide development for new users. Much of the software lacked intuition and the inability to approach it with a more syntax based code technique really threw us off. Often times we would find that an incredibly easy java solution was incredibly challenging to implement in Outsystems.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were successfully able to implement the google maps layout in our UI and we were generally pretty proud of the concept in general and the graphics we were able to design to aid in the overall feel of the app.

What we learned

A more thorough perusal of the application options would have probably left us with a better software to move forward with. Outsystems had promise but we would have benefited from a more developed software basis or a larger user base to work with.

What's next for Vole Social

Ideally, final implementation of the database system, authentication through applications like Facebook, and due to the social nature of the application, many other designs based on the needs and demands of our client base.

Built With

• google-maps
• outsystems