XPLore

Inspiration

With two of our team members involved in Greek life at Virginia Tech, we noticed a clear gap in access to information about available philanthropy and service opportunities. That's when the idea hit us: why not build an application that centralizes all nearby community service events into a single platform? This way, whether you're a member of Greek life looking to advertise your own organization's events, a student searching for service hours, or a caring individual trying to find a way to give back, XPLore provides all the necessary information for finding fulfillment through service.

What it does

XPLore is a web-based application that centralizes all the community service events in the area into a single platform. In an effort to inspire involvement through competition, XPLore gamifies philanthropy by rewarding experience points to the user for completing events, allowing the user to level up and compare themselves against the top performers locally or members of their group. Finally, the app also personally tailors events to its users based on previously completed events, experience level, the proximity of the event to the user's location, and personal interests recorded in the user's profile

How we built it

Front-end: We built the frontend using Next.js with the App Router to handle server-side rendering, routing, and dynamic UI for features like opportunity discovery and gamification dashboards. Styling and components were implemented with Tailwind CSS and shadcn/ui, while lightweight state management (Zustand and React Query) enabled real-time leaderboard updates

Back-end: The backend uses tRPC with Next.js API routes to create fully type-safe endpoints that connect the frontend to a PostgreSQL database managed through Prisma. Additionally, services like NextAuth.js were used for OAuth, allowing users to sign in properly.

Challenges we ran into

Although we had some minor experience with Kiro before the hackathon, one of our main challenges was learning how to provide sufficiently detailed and structured prompts so that it could effectively generate code and scale our real-world application. Continually, despite having an agentic AI to do much of the programming for us, we found that our application was riddled with bugs and required tons of tedious debugging to ensure that the primary function of XPLore could be carried out.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Overall, our team is most proud of completing XPLore before the deadline. Since all of our team members—aside from our mentor—were participating in their first hackathon, we were navigating a completely new experience together.

What we learned

We learned how to effectively leverage agentic AI to build a full-stack application in a limited time frame. Also, we learned the ins and outs of front-end to back-end integration, ensuring that both sides of our application work fluidly together.

What's next for XPLore

The next vision for XPLore is to further gamify the app by adding a shop to buy items for your personal avatar and seasonal time events/themes to continue to encourage engagement by offering limited-time rewards that the users can't resist.