Inspiration
Brown has a wide variety of advising, but there doesn’t exist an application to link every form of advising at Brown such as Meiklejohn/IMP/Faculty-student advising. We are interested in setting up an efficient network that helps mentors and mentees connect.
What it does
This site takes existing information on Brown’s website and serves as an extension with a functional purpose - to highlight potential mentors who would be ideal matches for mentees with similar interests.
How we built it
Using Firebase, we generated a database for collecting basic faculty profile information that would capture their expertise, skills, and interests. We developed the front-end in a user-friendly manner using Bootstrap software, ultimately creating a site that Brown students could use for participating and viewing the faculty profiles.
Challenges we ran into
Initially, our team ran into the difficulty of synthesizing an idea -- one that would be original, but also feasible. Our second obstacle was our fluency in coding. For most of us, this was our first time utilizing a powerful tool such as Firebase, and this took us a significant amount of time to read the documentation, learn, and implement into our final product.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're really proud that we had an amazing opportunity to be exposed to code. The majority of folks in our group didn't have formal coding education, and the opportunity to learn, break, and experiment with HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Firebase was a tremendous learning opportunity. If anything, we're really proud that we have a foundational springboard from our project to venture into CS. It's given us confidence!
What we learned
The back-end development process takes a long amount of time! Be prepared to thoroughly think of how your database is structured.
What's next for Mentoring@Brown
Given that this is a preliminary prototype, we plan to refine the UI/UX of this interface with user testing. Excellent UI design should be frictionless, and with further user input we can make our interface as clean as possible for future users.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.