PEERS

PEERS is a social media/forum/mentorship matching system all in one. It helps put girls and women looking to go into STEM in touch with a community to support them and find mentors to help guide them.

Comment

Inspiration

Currently, STEM is a male-dominated field, which can often be intimidating for girls and women who are interested in these subjects. Not only is it difficult to see themselves as well represented within professional settings as their male peers, it is also difficult to find mentors who can relate to their lived experiences.

What it does

PEERs has two primary ingredients - a forum and a matchmaking service. The forum provides a judgement-free environment for people to ask questions about STEM fields, no matter how stupid they may feel, to professionals who can relate to their lived experiences. The matchmaking service is an extension of a “friending” feature like those seen on Facebook and Discord. The service itself can be compared to a dating app of sorts, most similarly, Bumble Bizz, which uses the dating app format for networking, but also provides suggestions for conversation starters to help spark connections.

How we built it

Due to limitations in our coding knowledge, we decided to primarily focus our coding efforts on making a functional matchmaking algorithm, and demonstrate the rest of how PEERs would work using Figma. If we were to expand it into full functionality, however, we would possibly create a web app using React alongside backend support from Firebase.

Challenges we ran into

Our team is mainly experienced in back end development, so when it came to the front end aspect, we could not create a functional platform within the given time constraint and instead utilized Figma to demonstrate our ideas.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're all quite proud of how we each challenged ourselves to try something different than we're used to and, to use a cooking metaphor here, experiment with new ingredients.

What we learned

Each member of our team has pushed her limits and explored something a bit new to them during this hackathon, technical or otherwise. Lucy, who primarily codes during hackathons, used Figma and worked more with design for the first time with this project. For Jessica, this has been her first hackathon, and learned a lot about the collaboration process. In particular, she learned how to collaborate remotely using GitHub repositories. This has also been Marjona’s first hackathon and she was able to challenge herself and step out of her comfort zone to learn new skills that have strengthened her programming abilities. The most memorable for her has been learning about the ways in which front-end and back-end development come together to create something amazing.

What's next for PEERS

As it stands right now, most of PEERS exists as a series of Figma frames. On a technical level, the immediate next steps would involve translating more of the ideas into actual code. Beyond that, however, there were many ideas we wanted to flesh out more such as finding a way to make creating matchmaking profiles smoother, making an identity verification system to reduce trolls, and adding more resources to the platform to make it easier for users to access informative content.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates