Connect Quest

Do you feel like your school's community engagement is lacklustre at best? Connect Quest brings you the community your heart desires! Connect with fellow students and challenge yourself to engage!

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Inspiration

Our team was inspired by wanting to create a more social space for students at university. After the pandemic, people are more reluctant to engage with each others especially if they have not previously met them. We wanted to create a gamified social app that encourages students to meet each other and explore their community.

What it does

The project is an application that takes a user and prompts them with a daily challenge to get themselves out there. Completing the challenge awards a user with points so they can compete for high scores with their friends.

How we built it

Our application has a frontend, backend, and cloud database. The frontend utilizes React while the backend uses NodeJS and an API to connect to our Mongodb Atlas database via Defang.

Challenges we ran into

While attempting to connect our database to the API, we had ran into some issues. However, after careful debugging and learning more about the tools that were unfamiliar, we got all our layers connected. For many of us, it was the first time using React and implementing it in an application. One of the biggest challenge was to learn React functionalities from almost no prior knowledge and how to tailor them to our project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Because a lot of the technology used in this project was unfamiliar to the team, we sometimes felt unsure if we could get everything working together and how to get through the errors. But from keeping each other motivated and not giving up, we were able to bring our vision to life.

What we learned

We used many tools for the first time in this project and got to learn and experience how to utilize these to enhance the development process. We also learned what it is like to build an app from scratch and how frontend/backend/database all interact with each other. Additionally, we learned about different tools we could use for a specific purpose and which are better to use for which cases. (for example, SQL vs NoSQL)

What's next for Connect Quest

In the future we would like to add more features such as leaderboards for friends, location based challenge prompts, and university verification to connect with others.

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