Zoomiez

Our Inspiration

It is evident that the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has affected all of our lives in one way or another. Specifically for college students, all of our classes and work have become remote. Our goal was to create a project that can help the everyday lives of college students a tad bit easier.

We created a survey and sent it out to various students from six different colleges: UC Irvine, UC Riverside, Cal Poly Slo, UCLA, and Irvine Valley College. This survey included questions such as:

Are you currently working remotely?
Which virtual meeting platforms do you use on a daily basis?
How often do you attend a virtual meeting/class?
Where have you had to access your virtual meeting links.

38 students responded, and this is what we discovered: 44.7% of students attend virtual meetings more than 4 times a week,100% of the students use Zoom, but none of them access their virtual meeting links from the same location. The reason behind this is because teachers may host Zoom links on Canvas, while clubs/organizations send out Zoom links on Facebook or through Email. So why doesn't a student have just one location where they can easily access all these links?

What is ZOOMIEZ?

ZOOMIZES is a Google Chrome Extension that allows users to easily join their meetings, while also give the ability to add new meetings as well. This extension acts as a little helper to get you through your long day of virtual interactions.

How we built it

I used a React application to create a simple Chrome extension. I developed a firebase firestore database to store all the data that we got from the form in the Chrome extension.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into was that we were really excited about our idea, but thought too big for the 12-hour time constraint that we were given. As time started ticking away, we realized that our idea couldn't be completed in time; therefore, had to quickly figure out alternatives to condense our project.

Another challenge we faced was that we were unable to perfect the stylization of the extension. But that's okay! We'll continue working on it despite Cutie Hack 2020 coming to an end.

What we are proud of

We were able to create a little meeting helper! We believe that this feature, although small, could make a big impact on student's everyday lives. Additionally, this was our first hackathon as a pair, and we were proud to have made it through!

What's next for ZOOMIEZ

Although we weren't able to complete it during this hackathon, we want to continue building this extension by providing a dashboard webpage for users to view and customize their meeting links. In the future, we want to strengthen our idea to create a button to directly input a zoom link into the extension, without having the user copy and paste the link. Additionally, we hope to add personalized features to link this extension with the user's Google accounts. Hopefully, we can create the best little meeting helper known to date!