Uni-Verse

Uni-Verse Logo
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Inspiration

Strong connections and close friendships are hard to come around. Finding friends and creating those connections does not come so easily for everyone, whether you are an extrovert or introvert. As a matter of fact, even those who are super social, find it difficult to make friends in college, especially ones that you can easily get along with. This problem has only gotten worse with online school where college students find it more difficult than ever to make new friends; stripping them of the best part of the college experience.

What it does

Once the user signs up, they are prompted with a questionnaire in order to help us evaluate their personality and accurately match them with local students! We give the students the freedom to match with someone within their major or outside.

Unlike state-of-the-art meeting apps such as Tinder and Bumble, Uni-Verse focuses on building friendships. The key differences are:

Instead of an application surrounding hook-up culture and romantic relationships, our application is creating friends
We are connecting people at their university or a local university (within 30 miles). Therefore, building a close-knit "universe" at the university.
Keeping the safety of the user in mind, only people with active academic emails (ex: sjsu.edu) can sign up, as this prevents catfishes.
We are creating connections through similarities in interests and careers rather than superficial aspects like looks, often the highlight of many other applications.

How we built it

Currently, this is a web application built using React.js and SCSS with a backend in Firebase to store the student data.

Challenges we ran into

Most of our team was completely new to working with Firebase, making it challenging to learn and implement within 2 days. Moreover, effectively sorting through the data and creating an algorithm to curate a list of the best possible matches.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This project was a huge reflection for the team since given a year ago we were struggling to work with web development languages. In this project, we not only did we successfully create a full-stack project, but we also did it only within 2 days, demonstrating our growth and skills as programmers.

What we learned

From completing this hackathon, we learned how to connect the backend and how it serves a vital purpose. We also implemented a functionality to upload and generate a public URL for images using Firebase's data retrieval functions.

Built With

Submitted to

SCEGGRAPH Hackathon

Created by

I worked on creating the questionnaire page which will be used to accurately match the user to friends locally. I also contributed to the backend by creating a functionality to upload and generate public URLs for images/profile pictures, which was included on the sign up page.

Surabhi Gupta
I created an algorithm that creates friend matches for the users using a script which creates a similarity score between the various users. In addition I setup Firebase and connected it to our React Application. I also created the various components of our homepage including the use of open-source SCSS to integrate into our website.

Seema Vora
I worked on the frontend in creating certain components of the hompage as well as the sign-up page credentials and the sign-in page. I also worked with the Firebase database and connected the user's answers from their questionnaire to the database. Finally, I mapped the file created by my peers on the matches page onto a slideshow.

Nanar Boursalian

Updates

Surabhi Gupta started this project — Jan 10, 2021 02:51 AM EST

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