ProjectPals

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Project Pals Home Page

Inspiration

Our inspiration comes from the shared frustrations in our university communities towards grievous group project experiences. Too often, universities use randomised matching for students - creating unbalanced, poorly matched groups. This increases the risk of mismatched expectations, poor communication, and conflicting working styles, which rob students of the opportunity to develop their vital collaborative skills.

What it does

Our app, ProjectPals, sets students up for success by creating a platform to form cohesive groups from the get-go. Our app streamlines the process of finding and connecting with a variety of like-minded individuals - allowing students to efficiently find peers with diverse skill sets who share the same project fundamentals. Team members will have the same academic goals, preferred communication platforms, and working styles.

How we built it

Our backend team built the app with Express, NodeJS, Typescript. Our frontend team built the app with Vite, shadcn-ui, Tanstack Router, SWR, TailwindCSS.

Challenges we ran into

TailwindCSS was a new CSS framework for all of us to learn throughout this project. As well, it had been a significant amount of time since our team had last used Express and NodeJS, so another challenge was re-learning and building upon our previous skills. Finally, one of our team members was entirely online, so our workflow was more asynchronous than we would have liked, creating communication difficulties.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud of finally completing a hackathon project together, as this is the first project our team has made! We loved the theme this year, and feel that Project Pals targets an especially relevant pain point when "people are brought together", given that we are all university students. We're happy to have made a MVP of a practical web app, which we would love to see officially implemented!

What we learned

Throughout the highs and lows of this hackathon, we've learnt that an open, curious, learning mindset truly creates a healthy approach to creating projects under a time crunch such as this! We've also reinforced the importance of planning, as our team was able to explore a range of different hackathon solution options, and thoroughly enjoyed brainstorming and choosing the project we are most satisfied with. Previous hackathon experiences where the first good idea was immediately chosen due to the tight timeline resulted in less satisfactory results, as there may have been better alternatives!

What's next for ProjectPals

ProjectPals has big dreams in becoming a fully fleshed web app! We recognise a lot of students are already trying to find their groups for courses already - on platforms such as course forums, Reddit, and Facebook. We would love to realise ProjectPals and see it being used in our universities.