This project is essentially a networking app with the overarching goal to break down gender, experience, and social barriers between computer science students. The aim is to celebrate diversity, and connect students who otherwise would never have met. Additionally, the aim is to provide both students and faculty to discover each other's interests outside the academic setting, helping bridge the gap between students and professors.
It is a common stereotype that CSCE students tend to be white males, gamers, programming since they were 12, etc, but we know the CSCE department is more diverse than that. There are females, POC, LGBTQ+, people who just learned how to program in PF1, or athletes that feel like complete outliers and too intimidated to interact with people in this major. This often excludes the “non-stereotypical” CSCE student — this may be unintentional, but we can especially see this with female CSCE students. Their participation and engagement with fellow students is on average, lower. Beyond just gender, people face biases for other reasons, such as the woman who wrote a post for #BlackAtUark explaining how a professor assumed she had not written her program. Our application seeks to break down these barriers in a concise manner through profiles and matching based on skill sets and interests, hoping to bring to light the unseen diversity in the department.
- Users can rate their interests based on six areas: fashion, food, gaming, outdoors, music, and reading
- Users can enter information such as classification, grad- uation date, and programming experience
- UARK data such as enrolled courses is retrieved for each user
- A simple, back-end algorithm comparing users’ interests to suggest top three matches
- Matching functionality so users can ”like” each other
- Chat functionality so that when two users like each other, they can chat to get to know each other better
- Filter functionality so users can be filtered based on specific interests or attributes
- A special faculty/staff view (if the signed in user is faculty/staff) with match functionality disabled
IMPORTANT: currently does not work on Android, ONLY on iOS. see information at the very bottom.
Instructions can be found here: https://docs.expo.io/workflow/expo-cli/
Go to your app store, and download Expo Client (if you want to run on a physical device)
You need to be connected both on your computer AND your phone! Directions for getting on the VPN can be found here: https://its.uark.edu/network-access/vpn/index.php (On your phone, download the Global Protect app)
NOTE: if trying to run on android simulator, see note below before following these steps
- Clone this repository.
- Navigate into the root directory
- To be safe, run
expo upgrade - Run
npm install - Run
expo start - Your web browser should pop up, and you can run on iOS or Android simulator. To run on a physical device, you should see a QR code in the bottom left. Scan this on your phone (for iPhone, via the camera app, for Android, from inside the Expo Client app)
- And there u go!
To run on Android simulator:
- Navigate to android emulator folder, ex
$ cd /Users/rashighosh/Library/Android/sdk/emulator - Display which simulators you have with:
$ ./emulator -list-avds - Pick a simulator and run it.
$ ./emulator -avd Pixel_3a_API_27
IMPORTANT app does not currently work on android, due to some npm package version mismatches with the current expo sdk version.. this is a fix for future work. The issue is detailed here: lottie-react-native/lottie-react-native#617