Calmpanion

Inspiration

We were inspired, as computer science majors, to thoughtfully focus on the need for college students' mental health. Given that, as college students, we are very young adults grappling with adulting, educating, and staying sane somehow throughout all of it... all this cannot be accomplished without taking care of our mental and emotional well-being to avoid ramifications like burnout. As college campuses become hotbeds for mental health concerns, the act of putting pen to paper serves as a cathartic release, allowing students to unload their anxieties and gain valuable insights into their emotional states. We were inspired to have certain features of the app like Journaling because one of our group members took a class where students participated in a creative expression exercise where everyone journaled based on a picture prompt. This experience, along with several others of each group member reaffirmed the importance of journaling and its several benefits like increasing self-awareness and reducing stress.

What it does

An app for college students to use to maintain and do simple, very less time-consuming tasks to take care of their mental health and ensure that they are well enough to keep tackling their crazy, tumultuous lives. The app largely lets students maintain an in-app journal, have daily check-ins on their current mental state, log three things they're grateful for every day, find different resources like helplines and other on-campus center websites to seek help, etc.

How we built it

Using Swift and Figma.

Challenges we ran into

We struggled with coming up with a final idea and game plan as the team had a lot of individual thoughts flowing. In the end, everything worked out and we were able to collaborate and come together to a point where we all found a way to utilize our strengths for our team. Lastly, we faced challenges with coding in Swift as we didn't have a lot of experience on our team with it and definitely took some time to get used to the syntax and XCode as an IDE.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A few of use came in with zero experience with Swift but we somehow managed to successfully program and app in full capacity. It is not easy to learn a new language, much rather create an app in an especially small time-constraint. But, we are all very glad to have made it happen and are thankful for the experience this has provided us to code and do something special.

What we learned

This experience has taught us to truly collaborate as a team and let all our ideas flow into one organized, impactful project. We learned app development in iOS which is not an easy feat and learned that although we may have had experience in app dev largely, depending on the ecosystem and tech stack, the experience can be quite different.

What's next for Calmpanion

Possibly integrating more features into the app like being able to log in as a verified UMass student through the UMass student NetID which would involve the use of authentication, having a proper database setup to have the app take in multiple users, and fine-tuning existing features of the app including UI/UX.