An app for discovering and attending social events at the University of Washington. With features like Tinder-style swiping, calendar mode, personalized event recommendations, and calendar integration, users can easily browse, save, and share events with friends while filtering by location and interests.

• Home Page: Browse and swipe through events.
• Calendar Page: View events added to your UW Google Calendar.
• Profile Page: Set up your profile with your UW email, including name, major, graduation year, interests, living situation, and cultural/social background. First-time users are guided through a slide-show format setup, ensuring all profile details are collected interactively.
• Login Requirement: Users must log in with their University of Washington email to access the app.
• Navigation Drawer: Easily switch between pages.

As students at the University of Washington, we recognized that on such a diverse and lively campus, it’s challenging to keep track of all the various events happening. From events hosted by the UW’s Residential Programming Board at dorm halls to club workshops and meetings, following and staying aware of all these events can become overwhelming for students, to the point where it hinders connectivity between them. That’s why we wanted to create something that would simplify the process of discovering and attending events, promoting connections between individuals at the UW. And so DubEvents was born — a mobile application that enables students to easily browse events and save them in an organized calendar, making it effortless to stay connected with everything happening on campus and to foster new communities.

DubEvents is a sleek, mobile-based platform that helps UW students discover social events through an engaging interface. Users swipe through events to decide whether to attend, with a Right motion meaning Yes, and a Left motion meaning No. Once the user swipes right on an event, it is added to their organized weekly calendar. Users can also click on each event to read more about it. All of this is saved to the user’s profile, along with their personal information. This helps UW students stay aware of events around campus and organize their event attendance in a less overwhelming way, promoting connectivity between students.

We developed DubEvents on Android Studio, using Java and XML as our primary programming languages. Our application can currently be run on Android devices. The swiping functionality uses a card stack implementation for the events. The design was inspired by the UW color palette: dark purple, white, black, and tan/sandalwood colors. We drew out the UI layout and framework by hand before implementing the XML pages, focusing on a minimal design.

We encountered multiple challenges throughout the creation process of this idea and application. One of our biggest challenges was working with Git and GitHub, as multiple members made changes simultaneously. Several of us were new to Git, so it was challenging to navigate and learn how to use these new tools effectively while performing hands-on work with other new platforms. In particular, we struggled with learning how to commit and branch off the same repository, and kept running into push/pull issues. On top of being new to Git and GitHub, we were also working with Android Studio for the first time and learning the interface of this new platform. At first, we didn’t fully understand how it worked, and ended up working in Kotlin, a language with which none of us were familiar, for a while before converting our code to the more familiar Java language. Integrating swiping with calendar functionality while ensuring that event data is stored accurately was a feature that initially presented us with challenges. The more pages we wanted to include in our design, the more complicated it became and the more detail we had to handle. Therefore, we had to figure out how to ensure that the same Saved Events appeared in the calendar and disappeared from the main page, regardless of how many times the different pages were reopened. Additionally, designing a clean yet expressive interface that matched the University of Washington's branding, while remaining unique, was also challenging. We wanted to stay connected to the color system of the University, but it was confusing to connect it to the colors in the app. Lastly, we had to address conflicts within the team regarding planning and executing various ideas, as well as allocating our time efficiently. At times, it was difficult to find unique tasks for all four of our team members to work on, and we occasionally found ourselves with two people working on the same project without realizing it.

We are proud to have brainstormed this unique and beneficial application idea for students. We wanted to come up with an idea that would have a lasting impact, and we are glad that we developed a concept that we can eventually introduce to the community we interact with every day. Developing this app idea and implementing a basic product was a significant step. Within the time constraint we were given for this hackathon, we accomplished a great deal and incorporated many of the features we originally planned to include. For most of us, this was our first time using some of the tools and resources we used to build this application, like Android Studio and GitHub, and many of our first times creating an app/personal project in general. We put in a lot of effort to educate ourselves on these tools, especially the branching system in Git. By the end, we were all able to work on the same project side by side, a significant improvement from our initial struggles with the version control system. We also learned how to use Android Studio effectively and explored the various tools it provides, such as connecting Git Copilot to assist with our coding. We also designed a beautiful and cohesive user interface that aligns with our theme. We are really glad to see how the layout of all the pages line up nicely, and how there is a visible connection between them all. Ultimately, we developed a professional-looking swipe-to-save events application that we we will be able to use to help foster communities and build friendships at our very own school, which is what provides us with the most satisfaction.

Throughout this process, we learned how to design intuitive user flows for multiple browsing modes. We struggled to determine which system we wanted to cater to. Most of us work on Apple projects, but they aren’t compatible with those who have Android devices. That is why we centered on Android Studio, because we would be able to work on both Android and iOS. We also collaborated on a project together, from brainstorming the idea to turning it into a real prototype, and addressed conflicts, such as team arguments. This is something that every group faces, but we were able to communicate well, and our teamwork definitely shone throughout this process. Another large growth area for all of us was exploring the various features of GitHub, particularly those related to merging branches and resolving merge conflicts. We had to do a lot of trial and error with GitHub, especially in the beginning. Our first couple of repositories became quite messy as we struggled to figure out how to work together and utilize all the collaboration features. At one point, we even had to scrap everything and start fresh… twice. Eventually, we began to get the hang of branching and merging, which made things a lot smoother. That said, we're definitely still learning, and even now our repo could be way more organized. But we’ve come a long way from where we started! We also learned the importance of branding and visual consistency in campus-focused apps. We created a logo that we could place on almost every page, and found that it adds a level of professionalism that lends more credibility to the app and can gain a deeper level of trust from users.

We’re really excited about what’s next for our app and plan to continue developing additional features beyond this submission. One of the key initiatives we’re working on is UW NetID sign-in, which enables us to ensure that everyone using the app is either a current student or a member of a registered student organization. It’s a small step, but it helps keep the community authentic and UW-focused. Currently, we manually pull event information, but moving forward, we aim to provide clubs and organizations with the ability to post their events directly. That way, they can keep their members in the loop, and students can more easily find events that match their interests, particularly ones related to their major. Personalization is another big piece of our vision. We want the app to recommend events based on your major, interests, background, and even your location - whether it’s North Campus, West Campus, or off-campus. We plan to utilize AI to refine these suggestions over time. We’re also planning to expand beyond Android by launching iOS and a web version, so students can access the app in whichever way works best for them. As we grow, we would love to collaborate with UW departments to showcase academic and career events and gather genuine feedback from students to help shape the app into something that genuinely works for the community. At the end of the day, our goal is to build something that makes it easier for students to connect with events, with opportunities, and with each other.