Pal.arm

Created with social distancing in mind, Pal.arm is a friend-finder app that allows you to meet new people! The app will notify you when someone who is compatible with you is nearby (Within 10-feet)!

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Inspiration

Inspired by a teammate's younger sister and a Korean Drama called 'Love Alarm', this app aims to improve the ability to make friends during the Covid-19 pandemic. For college freshmen and students who have had to attend online classes, making friends in a new environment has been a new and complex challenge. Pal.arm aims to alleviate this challenge by providing a friend-finder service that is socially distant and safe.

What it does

The user enters a username and proceeds to complete a brief survey to determine their compatibility score with other users. This compatibility score is based on interests, desires to meet similar or different people, zodiac sign, and other parameters such as friendship qualities the user values most. Users who are compatible with one another will receive alerts when they are within a specified distance of each other. Their mobile devices will ding and a heart will show up, indicating that someone they are compatible with AKA 'matched with' is close by! They can then proceed to strike up a conversation and introduce themselves!

How we built it

We primarily used Android Studio and coded the app in Flutter Dart. Firebase and firestore was used to establish the database and the google-maps API was used to establish the geo-location of the users such that their mobile devices would be able to detect where users are located relative to each other.

Challenges we ran into

MANY. We had several technical difficulties, including computers that wouldn't run code because they were out of memory, laptops that needed to be updated in order for Xcode to run, severe sleep deprivation, and code that refused to cooperate! We also ran out of time so we couldn't fully implement the google maps-API :(

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite our many challenges, we are very happy to have been able to submit something as part of our project. We were able to implement a database using firebase and coded a 90% functional and interactive UI that is, for the most part, user friendly and aesthetically pleasing.

What we learned

We learned a lot of flutter during this hackathon and how to implement databases in a more detailed setting. We also learned how to start up the google maps API for future use.

What's next for Pal.arm

We hope to finish this app by improving the user interface and complete the google maps portion of the project.

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