Bubble | Devpost

bubble website
daily prompt text (designed for bubble version 1)

Inspiration

The worldwide phenomenon that is Wordle brings together users from all over the world to a play a once-a-day game. Loosely inspired by this successful tale, we present to you Bubble:

Young people from around the world have felt the repercussions on our mental well-being due to the never-ending restrictions imposed due to Covid-19. In the meantime, while we have been spending more time online, we have started to feel more disconnected from the real world. Journaling every day has proven to provide many mental health benefits, keeping people grounded and encouraging the practice of mindfulness and gratitude. Bubble is our solution to make self-reflection more accessible by encouraging members to get creative with daily journaling and reflection, as well as providing a moderated, anonymous bulletin board for people from all around the world to read each other's unique stories to a common worldwide prompt.

Also loosely inspired by "Humans of New York" and "Amours Solitaires" submissions; the NYT Crossword app's Daily Mini; and the apps that send out daily Bible verses/motivational quotes to subscribers.

What it does

Every day a journaling prompt is sent to our subscribers via SMS. The text will direct users to our website, and they will then be able to reflect and flesh out their thoughts before submitting an anonymous response. After submission, the responses will be displayed for members to browse and enjoy. Using our auto-tagging system, each response will be parsed and tagged for its topic. This allows for better categorization and organization of responses.

Ideal Goal: Our idea was to create an everyday activity to encourage young people to take a moment out of their day to reflect. Our hope was to accomplish this by using Twilio to send out a daily prompt to each subscriber. It would be a simple yet thoughtful prompt that would ideally allow members to take a moment to think in an otherwise go-go-go world. Members would be able to respond to these prompts and then their answers would be anonymously published to our website for the purposes of inspiring others by sharing stories of gratitude, motivation, and other #wholesome themes.

Actual Accomplished Goal: As it so often does, not everything went our way. We couldn't get many things to work and thus one of our main features was out of the picture. From there we ran into further problems understanding and implementing full-stack concepts which were foreign to all of us. In the end we accomplished three interesting programs which each are pieces of the puzzle, but undoubtedly there is much to do before a finished project is completed. We have a website that allows people to publish their story (but with no data base knowledge it just kind of disappears), a program that scours Reddit for thought provoking statements, and we used AI to classify words to give inspiration for any given prompt.

How we built it

Using a Reddit API and web-scraping techniques we collect writing prompts from the r/WritingPrompts subreddit. The top prompt from this subreddit is sent daily to subscribers via SMS through Twilio's API. Users are then directed to our website which was built using Flask and Twilio's API. Finally, our tagging system is built using Spacy and NLTK libraries. This program analyzes responses to the prompts we got from reddit and returns commonly seen and powerful keywords. We used Figma for the design aspects of the project.

Challenges we ran into

Integrating all the pieces of our project into one cohesive unit proved to be very challenging. Our original vision was to collect responses via SMS using the Twilio API; after hours of coding, we realized this was not in our capabilities. Our final demo is split into various aspects that currently operate independently however in the future we hope to integrate these components into one unit.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our persistence in debugging the various obstacles and adversities that came up throughout our project journey. This was our team's first hackathon, so it was difficult to get started on an idea as we were super clueless in the beginning, but we are incredibly happy with how far we have come. Each of us learned new concepts and put ourselves out of our comfort zones in the pursuit of new skills. While we may not have created a groundbreaking project, ultimately we had fun, we got frustrated, we googled, we talked, we laughed, and in the end, we all become better computer scientists.

What we learned

Asides from learning that Jonah's Redbull limit is 4 cans (the most important finding from this weekend, clearly), we learned what an API was, how to use one, the basics of full-stack development. Our team came into this project with zero experience working with front-end development and discovered how particularly challenging it is to connect the backend and frontend. We were exposed to new technologies such as Twilio and Glitch, which allowed us to add functionality to our project that we would have otherwise not been able to. We also learned a ton from the workshops and are personally very excited to code and launch our own websites! After getting sleep of course. #shamelessplug

What's next for Bubble

We hope that Bubble will allow for users from all around the world to connect through words and to realize that we are all probably more similar to one another than we would think. In the future, we envision creating sub-forums (or sub-bubbles, if you will) for various communities and institutions and to have Bubble serve as a platform for these organizations to host digital bulletin boards for their employees/students/members - similar to monday.com, slack, or asana, but for more wholesome purposes.