KidSocial

An app for children to stay in touch with relatives in a fully monitored environment.

This project was done as a part of the Software Engineering Immersive course at General Assembly. Check it out!

Functionality

• Allows parents to create an account for themselves.
• Parents can create accounts for their children.
• Parents can add contacts to their accounts, and decide which contacts their children can get in touch with.
• On account creation, each contact will get an email with their login credentials, and can log in to their accounts and place and accept calls.
• Children can log in to their accounts, created by their parents, and see all the contacts added for them.
• They can call their contacts by clicking on their pictures, as well as receive calls innitiated by their contacts.

Still to do

• Parents will get notifications for all the correspondence that their children do with their contacts.
• Turning camera on automatically on call
• Chat functionality will be implemented so that older children can chat with their contacts using text messages.
• Support for mobile and tablet devices.

Built With

KidSocial is built using the PERN stack, which includes:

• PostgreSQL
• Express.js
• React.js
• Node

Other technologies used include:

• Socket.io
• SimplePeer
• WebRTC
• NodeMailer
• Node Sass
• Cloudinary
• BCrypt
• pg

The project has been deployed using Heroku, and is currently live.

Wireframes

Basic wireframes were developed to understand the flow of the app.

How to run locally

To run this project locally, do the following:

1. Clone the repository
2. Install npm packages

npm i

3. Create the database using the schema.sql file

4. In frontend/package.json, add

   "proxy": "http://localhost:3001"
   

5. Create a .env file in your root directory and add EXPRESS_SESSION_SECRET_KEY

6. To allow nodemailer to send emails, add the following to your .env file

   EMAIL=email
   EMAIL_PASS=password
   

   Replace email and password with the email and password of the account you want to use

7. To run the server, cd into the root directory (containing server.js), and run

   npm run dev
   

8. To execute the frontend app, run

   cd frontend
   npm i
   npm start
   

9. Go to http://localhost:3000 to test the app