Worldside

Inspiration

We wanted to learn more about creating a mobile app and after reading the Synergy track, we decided on a social media platform.

What it does

Worldside's main feature is the World section in which users are matched with a country different from theirs every week. Users can learn about the country's culture, language, attractions, food, and more. Users while in the World section can decide to meet people of the country they are matched with (which users can also choose beforehand) and upon doing so, they will connect with people based on common interests. Users can chat and do activities with each other and as a result, work towards daily and weekly goals. At the end of the week, if enough goals have been met, users will receive a country-exclusive souvenir of the country they matched with for the week.

How we built it

We used React-Native to develop what we could for the front-end of the mobile application. For the backend, we used AirTable and utilized their API to connect their data to our project. We also used Figma for designing the user interface.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into all kinds of challenges. At first, we struggled with setting up a database and ended up using AirTable instead for simplicity. On the front-end, setting up the environment for the react-native project we made the Github repo before initializing the react-native project which was a big mistake because for several hours we researched into why we couldn't fix our file structure and upload our code to the right repository. To combat this, we eventually started over and set up the project first and then created the github repository. Developing the front-end was also a bigger challenge than expected because our team had a very limited skillset and little front-end experience. As a consequence, we ended up with very little implementation for the front-end.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were proud of overcoming failures that seemed to be trivial and our teamwork in distributing the tasks and communicating. Making a working database with AirTable and learning new skills was also very worth it for us.

What we learned

Mobile app development is very complex and requires the right setup and skillset, especially the front-end. A lot of the features we wanted to implement were too advanced for our team and would take too long to learn on top of the errors that were commonly made on the front-end.

What's next for Worldside

The future of Worldside will likely be a side project which needs large amounts of development on both the front-end and the backend.

Built With

• react-native