Staff's Choice Award at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's HackThis 2020 hackathon
Created by Aditya Azad, Saiyyam Kochar, Shruthi Kondin, Atulya Reddy, Prithvi Velpuri, and Winston Wang
With remote learning becoming the new norm, students are left without a way to have casual social interactions with their classmates. These interactions often transform into friendships or provide students with support throughout their coursework. Incoming freshmen may feel especially isolated if they don’t know anyone on campus. To help, we have created a platform for college students to find and form connections with their classmates.
Virmote is a mobile app that matches users with other classmates to study or make friends with. It asks users to select their courses and provide other information like year in school, major, learning style, preferred mode of communication, weekly availability, and interests. Users can customize their matching algorithm to seek classmates who match on certain parameters, as well as specify whether they are looking for a study buddy, friend, or both. When a user presses the “Match Me” button, Virmote generates the profiles of a few classmates that match their preferences, along with each classmate’s percent match. Users can then choose to chat with any of their matches or request new matches.
This app was created using Expo and React-Native for the front-end and Firebase for the backend. On Firebase, we utilized Firebase Authentication and Cloud Firestore in order to authorize and store users and user data. With Expo, we were able to develop and deploy quickly on Android or iOS devices.
There are still features that are in progress, like group chat functionality and animated match generation. Also, we will address UI accessibility concerns and implement email verification to prevent spam users. Finally, we want to embed features that facilitate studying within the app such as video chat, whiteboard collaboration, and a custom scheduling tool that takes into account each user’s availability.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FKYSP7wr9-FAObKSLyjk6vpERgGE0mNK/view?usp=sharing