uChange presented to McHacks9
Technologies
Inspiration
As one member of our team is going abroad next fall semester, she is struggling finding much information and the few that she found rarely matched the information she was looking for. She always got info from people who never went/are not going on a student exchange program or people who went to a country that was not similar as the one she was going to. This is how the idea of creating a chat system designed for exchange student was born.
What it does
uChange is a social media app that helps exchange students to know better about the location in which they are going to live in for a few months. To do so, the app matches two different students in a special way. Matches are decided on a single criteria: Their host university and their home university are the opposites of each other. For example, a student going from McGill to Oxford will be matched with another student that is going from Oxford to McGill. This way, they will learn more about their destination and their host university with someone who has a good grasp of it. If a student cannot be matched with the same universities, they will be matched instead with a student that goes or is from the same location as the university they are going to.
How we built it
We built uChange using React Native. We decided to use firebase as our database and as a backend service because it is more intuitive and one member of the team had prior experience with it.
Challenges we ran into
As this is our first hackathon, we were met with quite a few challenges. First, we had to spend a lot of time to find the idea for the project. Second, three of us had to learn React Native and to setup the development environment, which took quite a lot of time. Third, we had multiple issues with firebase as some information online was outdated and we had to fix these issues in a short amount of time. Fourth, late over the last night, we reached the cap for the number of free reads that we had on Firebase so we had to find a solution quickly. It was also hard to attend to all the workshops we wanted as we had to also have time to code our project.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We successfully did a functional application that does exactly what it has set out to do under 36 hours with a language that barely any of us had experience with. This type of application (a chatting service) is also something that none of us worked before so it is an achievement for all of us that we got it running. Another accomplishment is that we worked successfully as a team and helping throughout the whole weekend.
What we learned
We learned a new language and a new tool in Firebase. We learned that making a social media is not easy at all. We learned that we can work as a team as good in real life than virtual. Finally, we learned that hackathons are fun.
Preview
5 Oct 23, 2022
4 Oct 29, 2022