Inspiration
Mental health is an issue that affects hundreds of students at Waterloo. Many times, people don’t know where to go for help. With the long wait times for counseling services, we decided to create WatResource, a way to get students the mental health resources they need.
What it does
Students go to our web app to complete a pre-assessment quiz. The questions help the app determine the best mental health resource for your based on your customized answers. It assesses how urgent your need is and takes factors such as urgent care, communication type, and sociodemographics into consideration. For example, if you need urgent help now and are in critical condition, we will recommend the resources of police or hospital to you immediately.
How we built it
We used firebase to deploy our web-app, and used python and javascript for our backend. For our front-end we used html and css.
Challenges we ran into
Matching students with resources based on the responses was the most difficult. Our team created a decision tree to determine which sets of Yes/No questions should map to specific results. For example, if a student wanted to get help on campus (versus off campus) and through a peer (versus professional), what resource would best suit them.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We’re proud of creating a customized quiz that uses factors. We grouped the factors into: Level of urgency, communication type desired (online vs in person), type of setting (peer vs. professional), and sociodemographic (residency, religious, gender, religious belief) to match students with resources they did not know they could access. We are proud to link students to over 20 different resources.
What we learned
There are so many resources on and off campus for students.
What's next for WatResource
We plan to give the app to the University of Waterloo to share it with students so they can use on campus. We plan to promote it to first years especially, who may not know the resources available, as they just started university.
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