Ate & Kuya

Ate & Kuya means older sister and brother in Filipino. As two beginners hackers from the Philippines we wanted to create a solution catered to students who are struggling to navigate virtual classes.

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Inspiration

Our inspiration for this project came from our friends and relatives who are still in HS or freshmen at college struggling to find a community outside their academic life. As we all know virtual classes can be stressful and the lack of community and school organizations makes it harder for incoming college students and freshmen to talk to upperclassman and get tips and tricks to navigate and maximize all the events and resources their university has to offer.

What it does

We wanted to create an app for students to easily find peers to help guide or mentor them through classes they are struggling with or just want to have someone to talk to as to release their stress from school or personal life.

How we built it

Since we are only two beginners with no background for back end app development, we decided to make a prototype purely on figma. We learned how to use the various plugins in the community that helped us check if the colors were using are still accessible for the visually impaired. we also used color hunt to help us find the right color pallets to help us design our app. We also used GitHub and it's Kanban board feature to help us stay organized as we built the structure,layout and features of our prototype.

Challenges we ran into

AS beginners we ran into a few roadblocks when designing the app. The first problem was that one of our teammates had no coding background and did not have any prior experience to working with Figma. we had to go through a quick crash course on how wire-frame and deign apps before proceeding with the Ate & Kuya App. The second roadblock we ran into was the fact that none of us we're had worked with figma smart animations and it took us more than an hour to build a simple spinning loading icon for the app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As a beginner team of two the thing we are most proud of is that we were able to finish a prototype in such a short period of time. We were also proud of the color pallet that we used as it took us around 2 hrs of trial and error to see which color pallets on colorhunt best fits the layout and design of our app. The other thing we are proud of is the loading animation on our app, since none of us had any background in animation we were very delighted to just see it run smoothly and it gave us the confidence to work on more UI/UX projects in the future even if we do not have a CS or UI/UX background.

What we learned

Having a beginner on board I guess we could say our team has learned a lot throughout this hackathon. We were able to make wire-frames, use agile methodologies to stay organized and the basic tools on figma to get us from 0 to 1! We LOVED how everyone at HackNYU were so supportive of beginners and having mentors on shift all throughout the event really helped us get some necessary feedback on our design and prototype. Although HackNYU is a hacking competition, the event and support of the organizers and mentors really gave us the opportunity to try and experiment with new things that we wouldn't have been able to learn in school. This event really showed us that anyone can get started with hacking and there is no idea too big or ambitious for the ones who are determined to solve a problem they really care about.

What's next for Ate & Kuya

Our next steps is to reach out to Universities and youth groups in the Philippines and have them try our prototype and see how it could be improved to best fit their needs. We hope we can continue this project and make it into a real app or get volunteers to help us develop it in order to help more students across the country.

Built With

  • figma
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