Creators: Adrian, Amber, Dylan, Kinton
Our group was inspired to create Bridge after noticing that many of our friends and fellow students (us included) feel that we do not keep in touch with our parents enough in college. We miss them a lot, but because of our busy schedules and their busy schedules, it's often hard to find time to call or update them as much as we want. We can keep in touch with our friends and see what they're up to through social media, but it's not common for parents to use social media. Additionally, the major social media platforms today may not be as user friendly towards our parents' generations as they are towards ours. There are no apps out there geared toward increasing interactions between parents and their children, so we hope to ✨bridge✨ that gap:)
Bridge's main page is a thread shared exclusively between you and your parents. There are three main features you can use; post messages, post pictures, and post voice memos. Bridge will give a daily prompt for both kids and parents to follow. The prompt will require you to answer it with one of three methods: a text message, a voice message, or an image. The rest of the app will lock down until the prompt is completed within the hour to entice the user to actually follow it (similar to BeReal). Prompt examples could be "share a picture of what you ate today" or "share your favorite recipe recently".
The frontend is created with React Native and Expo. The backend was created with Firebase.
We ran into issues trying to merge the backend and frontend together. Also one of our team members spilled a $9 double torture from Dutch bros that we had to clean up
For 3/4 of our team, this was our first hackathon, so it was a really fun learning process!
We learned how to use React Native and for some of our team members, it was also their first time working on fullstack development.
We thought about making a thread for extended family as well. That could be something we implement next.