Gradify

Creating a post on Gradify
Creating your anonymous profile
Gradify's landing page
The main hub for Gradify where you can see other peoples posts and interact with them.
When clicking on a past post, you can use groq-api to ask how you can improve on what you posted about.
A users profile showing their past posts.

Inspiration

We all empathize with the feeling of falling behind academically, and that maybe our STEM major isn't for us. We wanted to have a platform where we could destigmatize that notion and create a safe and laid-back space for people to realize that they aren't by themselves and there are so many ways that they can improve academically both inside and outside the classroom.

What it does

Boosts the self-esteem of the user by creating a community that is transparent about the stresses of academics, especially in STEM fields where that transparency is uncommon.

How we built it

We used Javascript, HTML, and CSS, to create a web application for the user. We used tools like Figma and Lucid to outline how we wanted to build our site, and to better our understanding of how we want our user to interact with our site.

Challenges we ran into

Getting the application to work on a website. Our group isn't super experienced in web development or mobile development, so getting an environment set up where we could successfully start developing caused some troubles.

Figuring out a feedback loop to keep the users engaged was hard.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creatively tackling a universal problem that we don't think is addressed very often. We are also happy that we made a decent working prototype of our web application, given our low experience.

What we learned

We learned a lot about web development, and how we can learn tools like express.js and node.js.

We learned a lot about what keeps users engaged and what keeps them using the app for prolonged periods of time. We spent a lot of time studying other social media and what makes them popular. We also learned a lot on the structure of basic social media websites and how each particularly part part plays a role in the user experience. Through studying all of these, we learned how we could make our platform unique.

What's next for Gradify

We wanted to extend Gradify out of the STEM world, and into just a world of "general stressors". We think that the world we live in now is, and for good reason, scared to share their flaws because of how they want to hold their self image. By using our app, we think that this will help create a better environment, not only in just STEM, but for people to be transparent about all issues.

We would also like to further modularize our project so that we can implement React into Gradify. As of now it is just JS, HTML, CSS, but we would like to use React to make everything much cleaner and more scalable