Inspiration
At our school, we’ve noticed a severe problem with stress related mental-wellness. A lot of students cast aside their concerns without actually making any attempt to solve the problem. Our fear is that, if left unchecked, students’ long-term mental, and even physical health, will deteriorate. For this reason, we have created CareMail. Through CareMail, we hope to address the problem of mental wellness present in schools, and any other highly competitive environment.
What it does
CareMail is a service that allows one-way anonymous communication between a sender and a receiver. When a person uses their phone number to log into CareMail, they are asked to submit a weekly concern that they are experiencing. Their concern could be something as simple as, “I’m really stressed about a test that’s coming up this week. I’ve had to deal with a lot of things outside of school and that’s made it hard to focus on my schoolwork.” After writing and submitting this concern, another CareMail user that’s assigned to them will be able to view this concern without seeing the name of the user who wrote the concern. CareMail’s one-way anonymity allows for a user to decide whether or not they want to be publicly tied to the concern that they’re submitting. Then, the user who viewed the concern will write an encouraging message to the user struggling with the concern to give them a little bit of extra motivation. CareMail concerns last for a week, but the app operates on a daily basis so that a user will receive motivational messages in response to their concern every day of the week.
How we built it
We used Ionic 2, Cordova, Angular 2, and TypeScript to build the frontend, and Node.js and Parse to build the backend. Because we used the Ionic framework, the app operates on multiple platforms (iOS, Android, and Windows). During development, we were inspired by a project that Ethan recently built for a tradition at our high school called senior assassin. In senior assassin, users are assigned to one another in a circular chain so that they “kill” their target by spraying them with a water gun. The assassin knows who their target is but the target doesn’t know who their assassin is. CareMail operates in a similar fashion. The difference though, is that the anonymity behaves in reverse so that a concern can’t be directly tied to a user without that user confronting whoever sent them the encouraging message. Another slight difference is that senior Assassin encourages subterfuge and deception whereas CareMail encourages positivity.
Challenges we ran into
One of the biggest challenges that we experienced was in cross-component communication with Angular 2. Since it was most of our first time using Angular 2, we had some trouble making sure that it was working as intended. To make sure that components were properly listening to each other, we had to use RxJS observables and Angular event emitters.
Accomplishments that we’re proud of
One thing that we had a difficult time implementing was confirmation code authorizing in Angular 2. After a user logs in with their phone number, they receive a confirmation code as a text that they have to use to sign into CareMail for the first time. Getting this to work well and consistently was not the friendliest experience so we were very excited when we got it to work.
What we learned
Even though three of the team members had very limited experience working with the Ionic framework, Angular 2, and TypeScript, we were able to learn and incorporate the technologies within the 24-hour time frame of the hackathon. Also, it was some of our members’ first time using git at this event. Learning git to better manage workflow throughout the development process turned out to be a very valuable skill.
What’s next for CareMail
Our goal is to implement CareMail in any school or organization that has students or employees who’ve experienced problems with mental wellness. Even in schools or organizations that haven’t explicitly experienced problems as a result of poor mental wellness among students or employees, we’ve found that it’s entirely possible for students/employees to still be experiencing these problems. For example, even though many of the students at our school are highly stressed, the administration has done very little to explicitly address or recognize the problem. With CareMail, we won’t have to wait for the symptoms of mental health issues to manifest themselves in something extreme before implementing a solution.
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