KindnessBoard | Devpost

Board view
Adding text to your sticky note that you add to the board
Map view

Inspiration

At first, our inspiration was community bulletin boards--in a more digital world, we wanted to be able to replicate the feeling of belonging that comes from being able to see what events are happening in your community on your local bulletin board. We decided to modify this idea to become KindnessBoards, because we believed that this would be the best way to spread positivity and community in a way that is not just a replication of community bulletins but is unique and has a huge potential for good.

What it does

It allows users to create KindnessBoards at any location on the map, and add new sticky-note messages to the board that they've created. In the future once more features have been added, users can see other locations' KindnessBoards and add sticky notes to them as well!

How we built it

We used the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express.js, React.js, and Node.js) to create our project. We have a functional front-end that has a cute design for our KindnessBoards, as well as a backend that stores data about what boards have been created (including their title and location data) and has the ability to store all the data of the sticky notes on each KindnessBoard (with only a simple implementation of this functionality left to integrate into our project).

Challenges we ran into

Our backend took longer than anticipated, especially given the use of the Google Maps API, which we'd never used at all before. We all had limited to no experience in React, Express, and MongoDB, so the entire process was a learning curve which forced us to limit some of our initial functionality goals for the project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Given our challenges, we're really proud that we were able to create a usable product!! Each one of us learned a new technology throughout this hackathon, and we're able to have something to show for it at the end. Three of us were first-time hackers!

What we learned

One of our front-end coders had never used React before but had done amazing things by the end, one of our back-end coders was able to problem-solve and troubleshoot nearly every error we faced, and our other front-end coder had never used APIs but was able to integrate the Google Maps one super well.

What's next for KindnessBoard

We're going to implement full front-end back-end communication so that all boards can be fully accessed after creation, along with all their sticky notes. We'd like to implement location data from the user in the future, so that they can access the KindnessBoard nearest to them to get a nice surprise of positive messages whenever they're in a new area.