WeConnect

Inspiration: As a group of students who experienced the excruciating effects that COVID-19 had on both students' mental health and social engagement, we feel strongly that technology can be implemented to assist in easing, and eventually solving this issue.

What it does:

This application allows students to connect with each other through group studying interest groups, and trade with their fellow college students. It uses data pulled from canvas to connect students in the same classes, and interests and hobby data to connect students with similar passions. Students who wouldn't have known one another otherwise will have the opportunity to build meaningful and impactful relationships. This application also makes an effort to ease the process of joining class group chats. Instead of walking around sending GroupMe invite links, we wanted to be able to automate it and invite people within a certain geographic location.

How we built it:

The primary feature we built out was our group chat. Our application uses sockets to enable chatting across a network and the geolocation your browser (HTML5 geolocation) or phone already stores to create an open chat room for anybody within a specified mile radius. Determining eligible radius involves storing the latitude and longitude of where the chat room was created in MongoDB and then using a query to determine if another user is within a triangulated distance. Users can then join the group chat by name search. For deployment, we containerized our application with repl.it and are running an instance of our container on fly.io.

Challenges we ran into: In the beginning, we had a very broad idea about implementing the group chats. We wanted to include many features, however, it quickly became very complicated. It was difficult to narrow down our idea and focus on a specific problem. From there we also had to narrow down the features to make the implementation simpler.

Accomplishments that we're proud of: One accomplishment we were proud of is that we all met at this event and we created a friendship and were able to collaborate very well. Our ideas mashed with each other producing a quality product.

What we learned: We learned about the Canvas API and also about Mongo queries. Also, we learned a lot about teamwork and collaboration.

What's next for WeConnect: We would use React Native to build a cross-platform mobile application. Then, we would make calls to the Canvas API in order to display the student’s class data. The UI elements of our application would be designed in native base with a cloud mongodb instance for storing user data.

Built With

• doker
• html5
• java
• mongodb