Bloom

Bloom Landing Page
Bloom Description
Bloom Homepage

What is Bloom?

Bloom is a social media application created to bring out the best you! Hosting a plethora of content related to mental health and general self care, Bloom allows its users to consume content catered specifically towards improving their wellbeing.

Using Hedera, Bloom maintains user engagement through its proprietary cryptocurrency: Bloomcoin. With each video viewed, users can earn Bloomcoin, which can later be exchanged for any traditional currency. While incentivizing users to engage with Bloom, Bloomcoin also encourages quality content creation. Positive engagement towards certain videos will net their creators with Bloomcoin as well, fostering a positive community powered by Bloomcoin.

Users are then further incentivized to interact with Bloom through the gamification of the application. With daily challenges and login streaks, these features encourage users to stay on Bloom, consuming content catered to improving the wellbeing of its viewers.

Inspiration

As university students, we have grown accustomed and well-aware of the general gloomy atmosphere a campus can bring, particularly during exam season. Spirits are low, and stress is high. With a lack of social media sites prioritizing mental health, we saw this as a perfect opportunity to create an application that will raise the spirits of its users!

With access to Hedera, we were further inspired to gamify our application as well, allowing users to earn Bloomcoin by viewing content, as well as providing users with daily challenges and a login streak to maintain!

Article about stress among students: link

How we built it

The wireframes were created using Figma. Our frontend was built using Next.js, React, and Chakra UI, while a REST API in JavaScript was used for our backend.

We had also used Hedera in order to create and exchange Bloom's own cryptocurrency: Bloomcoin.

Challenges we ran into

Many challenges were immediately clear. As we were building a social media application, an abundance of features had to be implemented and further, more thought and care had to be made within the design process. Therefore the time such a project required had not been previously considered, which had led to a crunch that had not been anticipated.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite the large undertaking we had chosen to handle, the team did not lose morale. Being able to see specific features of the frontend completed, as well as the backend and wireframes being fully completed was a wonderful sight. While stressful, seeing the fruits of your labour is always the most exciting part of a hackathon!

What we learned

Bloom has been a learning experience for all members involved, from the beginning of TOHacks. We had learnt that implementing a functional social media site for the purpose of a 24-hour hackathon was a large undertaking, and as a whole more creative and useful ideas could instead stem from smaller apps. Brainstorming should occupy more time than we had invested, where many ideas should be ideated before one idea is fully committed towards.

Sleep is very important to maintain productivity, even if it cuts down on valuable time.

Allocate time towards participating in events, as many of our members were hoping to meet new peers and make potential new friends.