Volunteer Tinder

Inspiration

Being part of the Hypatia living-learning community, it is difficult to find volunteer opportunities that align with our skills and interest. Along with the Virginia Tech motto, UT Prosim (That I may serve), doing things we love and enjoy while giving back to our community inspired us to create this project. Volunteer Tinder creates a mean through which people connect with volunteer opportunities they are passionate about.

What it does

In this app, users create a profile and they input their name and skills. Users then get matched with volunteer opportunities, and are able to swipe right on opportunities that interest them and swipe left on opportunities that do not. After swiping right, users are able to connect with the volunteer organization. If there are no more volunteer opportunities available, it gives the message that there are no more opportunities near me

How we built it

To build Volunteer Tinder, we used VS Code and used React, along with HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Additionally, we used Figma to build a website prototype to plan our code.

Challenges we ran into

Since most of our team is relatively new to React and front-end development, understanding the syntax and the "how" and "why" of how it worked took some time to understand, but with some research, we were able to overcome this challenge. Additionally, when we were researching how to program this application, the challenges we ran into included version differences with our resources. We had a higher version of React installed, version 18. Most of the resources we consulted for this project used React 17. This caused issues which made our code not work as it was intended. To combat this, we would uninstall the recent version and install the older version that was compatible with the resources and tutorials we consulted online.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact we were able to start from scratch with little to no React experience among our team members, and that we were able to build a basic interface in the allotted 24 hours. Additionally, we are also proud of our team dynamics and how we were able to assist each other throughout the process and be efficient.

What we learned

Throughout this project, we learned the basics of React which we hope to improve upon in the next coming hackathons in the future. Additionally, we learned how to divvy up work to be the most productive we could be as well as effective communication skills among our team members.

What's next for Volunteer Tinder

As of now, our app allows only students to access Volunteering Opportunities. In the future, we intend to implement database platforms like MongoDB to allow many such Volunteering Opportunities to input their data on our app for the students to choose from. Additionally, we hope to deploy a location feature through an API (such as the Google Maps API) to improve the user experience by providing opportunities closest to them.

Built With

• css
• html
• javascript
• react
• vscode