Willow

Landing Page
Homepage
Doctor Status Selector Page
Video Call Example

Inspiration

Willow came to be as a culmination of various conversations we had with other university students before the hackathon itself. It became apparent that while there are a variety of struggles that students are faced with in online learning, mental health issues could be the most debilitating if not treated properly. Couple this with the restrictions of limited social interaction and a rigorous work schedule, and it becomes even more evident that this was an area that needed to be addressed.

What it does

Willow focuses on creating lasting support networks for individuals and bringing in specialist intervention when needed. It offers a variety of communication tools through which students can obtain support and find community. Some of these components include, but are not limited to:

a chatbot
a consultation page to receive advice from a registered physician/psychologist
a page for wellness workshops that Willow members can register for free of charge

How we built it

The UI was built using a Bootstrap foundation and styled with vanilla HTML and CSS. We used Firebase (namely FirebaseAuth, Cloud Firestore, and the message API) for specific functions of the website. The video chat was created by using WebRTC.

Challenges we ran into

One of the most memorable challenges we came across was when we were having a permissions issue when trying to access our database; it turns out that one of the main reasons it wasn't working was that a permission was set to True (not a boolean) instead of true. Capitals matter!!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our frontend team is proud of the work done towards making a clean UI, especially some of the background animations.

What we learned

Firebase is really, really useful. Using a service that tackles web hosting, data storage, and authentication all in one go saved us a lot of valuable time which we could use to focus on improving the user experience on the site.