Campus Connected

Inspiration

In the month of April 2023, the city of Davis, California faced an unfathomable event: the serial stabbings that took the lives from two of our beloved community members. Fear was beaming from students on campus, who had no parental protection to help guide them through this rough time. Some professors were accommodating; however, some weren't in the slightest. Team member Michael's enzyme professor denied his request asking for a class-wide extension on their homework assignment during the time when the killer had not been detained and was still lingering in the city. Perhaps, if there was a way for other students to express their agreement with Michael, the professor may have granted that desired extension. The students were stuck navigating a stressful time with a stressful assignment.

According to the 2021 UC Davis Student Health and Well-Being Data, the academic performance of nearly half of all UC Davis students are negatively impacted by stress and anxiety. 1 in 3 UC Davis students are experiencing psychological distress. Along with the feelings impacting academic success, the frequency of psychological distress highlights the immediate need for support and resources for the UC Davis community. Our app will help those closed off due to minimal mental well-being to connect with their professors, resulting in more extensions and academic flexibility, thus decreasing feelings of stress and anxiety.

What it does

Professors and campus administration (including ASUCD officials) can begin links (our term for making a post) that connect the community, one interaction at a time. Active students at the university can anonymously interact with links through sliders, multi-select, emoji reactions, or multiple choice options. Professors can ask students to rate specific lectures, homework assignments, exams, and deadlines. Administrators can poll students for feedback on campus organizations, legislations, and processes.

In the recent ASUCD elections, the student-run team has struggled in receiving voter participation from the campus community. One important measure, the Green Initiative Fund, has been distributing money to student sustainability projects for years. Due to the lack of voter participation, the initiative dissolved, which threatens many projects like the UC Davis Sheepmowers. The Sheepmowers provide an important mental wellbeing break in the middle of a stressful day for students, faculty, and staff. They have become a CRUCIAL part of the Davis community due to their benefits on mental health.

The benefits of the UC Davis Sheepmowers are many:

• decrease reliance on fuel for machinery and labor reductions
• enhance soil nutrition and promote carbon sequestration from the atmosphere
• encourage UC Davis affiliates to get fresh air and sunlight
• promote community building and community interactions
• alleviate symptoms of anxiety or of academic stressors

Without TGIF, the Sheepmowers can not function at maximum capacity. We hope that with the simplicity of downloading an app as opposed to having to navigate through multiple websites, we can help increase the voter participation across campus and help maintain measures like TGIF.

There are a handful of students who have introverted personalities or tendencies, and another handful battling mental health issues like depression and anxiety. These qualities have shown to discourage affected people from immersing themselves into social settings, decreasing their likelihood to communicate with their professors or school officials. With the anonymity and simplicity of our app, we hope to encourage these populations to provide feedback to those they may not regularly communicate with.


How we built it

We built our project using ReTool, an easy-to-use GUI tool that allows us to drag and drop our design and implement a backend to store user data and posts in.

Challenges we ran into

With only one programmer who had little experience in the field of SQL and app development, it took a while for us to get on our feet at the beginning of the hackathon. We however saw this as a learning opportunity and have taken a lot away from the development process.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Compared to the end of quarter course evaluations, our app would provide immediate feedback to course instructors, allowing for prompt changes to assist the well-being and stress levels of the students.

Due to the anonymity and accessibility features of our app, our project matches with the UN's Sustainable Development Goal of Reduced Inequalities. The mental health benefits from using our app also match with the goal of Good Health, as anxiety tends to increase risk of "coronary heart disease, congestive heart failure, stroke, fatal ventricular arrhythmias, and sudden cardiac death" (Olafiranye, et al.), which our application will impede.

Students can view a graph of responses based on how other students responded to links created by professors or campus officials. This feature increases the digestibility of information, thus increasing the accessibility towards understanding the data.

What we learned

We learned a lot more about 3rd-party app development and tying together many tools like JavaScript and SQL to make a finished product. We also learned how to use our interdisciplinary experiences to delegate tasks relative to each of our abilities. Furthermore, we learned about the intersection of public health and computer science.

What's next for Campus Connected

First off, we plan on expanding our application to be user-friendly for ALL college campuses in the United States of America. Looking at mental health statistics from other campuses, we see that our project can be useful elsewhere. For example, the University of Michigan reports that in the 2021-2022 academic year, 44% of students were experiencing depression and 37% of students were experiencing anxiety. On top of this, surveys carried out by fortune.com found that over 40% of students across the United States were battling some form of anxiety. The National Health Interview Survey estimates that 12% of U.S. adults were experiencing some form of worry, nervousness, or anxiety in 2022. This data comes of concern as over half of the adults in the United States attend college (Forbes), and a peer-reviewed article published in the National Library of Medicine has found that "high-anxious individuals are more likely to avoid such social interactions as communicating with strangers" (Wu, et al.) A healthy learning environment, just like a healthy relationship, requires communication between the students and professors to cater learning to maximize effectiveness and efficiency in learning and understanding course content. Stress and anxiety hinder the establishment of "a sense of belonging, and being cared for, valued, and supported" (CDC), quickly transforming academics into a mental burden.

We hope to form a team that focuses on campus partnership to aid in the registration process and promotional process from campus-to-campus.

As time did not allow, we were unable to add a slider and multiple choice feature to our project. We also would have liked to add more customization features to increase accessibility such as different font sizes, themes, colors, or layouts.

Built With

• retool