ComeUp

An app to help increase and promote diversity in STEM by making access to resources easier for students.

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Inspiration

The idea for this project came about from our own challenges finding scholarships and resources targeted to us. We are all diverse women in STEM and we know there are lots of resources out there to help us succeed in our degrees and after we graduate. The problem is most people can't ever seem to find them! Current solutions such as scholarship finding websites fail to live up to their expectations. For this reason, many great resources which would promote diversity in STEM go unused.

What it does

Our app ComeUp connects all students with resources to fit their needs, with a focus on diversity in STEM. We wanted to be as inclusive as possible so we allow users to see all resources or to choose to filter them based on certain criteria. As current students we also appreciate how mental health during online school is affecting students success. As such, we dedicated a small portion of the app to promoting healthy activities during COVID.

How we built it

We used GitHub to collaborate remotely and we built the app entirely using Java in Android Studio. We also used FireBase FireStore for our cloud storage.

Challenges we ran into

We had some challenges picking a database at first. We tried a few solutions, as highlighted in our video, before finding FireBase which worked really well for our needs. We also struggled to do some of the Firebase implementations in our app and faced quite a large learning curve, but ultimately managed to overcome most of it!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning so much together and building a functioning application.

What we learned

We learned lots about Java and Android, but we also learned about communication and teamwork. How to organize tasks amongst group members so that we could stay on schedule for the deadline.

What's next for ComeUp

There are many features which we would like to add to the app if we had more time that we feel would allow us to further achieve our goal. First and foremost while we started out with Android because we were most familiar with using Java, we would like to add IOS compatibility. We would also like to integrate a student connection platform that would allow students to connect and chat with each other to create connections, as well as be able to link their LinkedIn profiles. Another feature that we really wanted to implement but didn’t have time to do was add a web scraper that would search for resources to add to the database as well as a machine learning algorithm that could recommend really good matches to users and categorize the resources for us. As of right now, recommendations are only filtered through the filter button but we would like it to be personalized to the user with the option of overriding personalization. And finally, we would like a platform for professors to join and connect with their students as well as share things such as research opportunities.

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