Projectify

Problem Definition

It can be difficult for young girls to break into the STEM industry. We didn’t know much about the industry until very late. Not a lot of our friends in high school were interested in stem, so we did not talk much about it. One biggest advices we got was “build your portfolio” but we had no friends or guidance as to how we could with our limited skills. In addition, our schools did not advocate much for stem. It was something we had explore on our own. But lots of high school girls want to build their interest in stem and develop their skills however it can be very overwhelming to do so on their own. There may not be like minded individuals at their own school, or a proper club/program the school provides for them to work on projects or make teams for extracurriculars. In addition, even if you are pursing something on your own, it can be hard to stay motivated. This is where our solution comes into place.

User Research and Pain Points

We based our user research on two things: our experience in high school and user survey. Our experience was highlighted above. We also sent user survey out some high school friends (10 participants). These were some of results of the survey

70% of girls did not have opportunities to meet like-minded individuals in high School
90% of girls have not worked on any personal projects or side projects related to STEM in High School Based on this research we made a user personas who is a high student interested in exploring stem. This is our user persona: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/my-drive

Our Solution

Projectify connects high school girls looking to work on side projects with each other. The app includes 3 main features: 1) Explore - this page allows you to browse different side project ideas and click on the ones you are interested. It also allows you to create idea for side project and post it on the page. Once you find teammates you can contact them and form a group. 2) Accomplishments - this page allows you post your completed project and look at other student's completed project for inspiration. This is aimed to help students fell more motivated.
3) Badges - Users earn badges based on # number of projects they complete and the scope of their projects This is aimed to help students fell more motivated.

How do we plan on building it?

For frontend we plan to use Flutter. We choose Flutter as it uses a single codebase to develop applications for both android and iOS. For authentication to verify a valid Ontario school board email , we plan on using an online dataset that contains all Ontario school boards emails and checking it against email id they entered. For backend the app will be run on Python/Flask. It will contain multiple APIs to Use APIs to fetch data on projects/profile. In addition we will two relational databases using postgresql. First is "Users", which will contain the columns id, Name, Grade, Skills, Interests, Badges, project id. Second is "Projects" which will contain the columns project id, # of users, roles, level, tags, users id, status. In backend of the explore page we will fetch data on projects that have status of "Not Started". The accomplishments will fetch data a on projects completed. Profile will fetch data on users profile from "Users" database

Challenges we ran into

Half of our team was new to Figma so we had learn how to use the tool and make a live prototype. None of us also had any experience in app development, so we had research about the tools we want to use.