Flow1 (Twilio)
Flow2 (Twilio)

Camtour is a project using Twilio software to connect high school and college students to provide future college-goers easier access to more customized and engaging services of campus tour on demand!

Inspiration

The problem we're trying to solve:

How can students visit college campuses virtually without scheduling an appointment? Come on, as a junior I have a list of 8 colleges that I want to know more about, and below are the options that I have:

Purchase a $300 plane ticket
Schedule an appointment, wait a couple days/weeks for an online zoom meeting with a random college student with other 20+ students, with no freedom to explore places that I want to go
Watch 360 video or worse, just videos
Reddit may offer insider views, but depends on luck and perseverance of searching for 2 hours
Discord needs maintenance and it's hard to get diverse opinions from non-discord user

We also want this platform to benefit students who forgot to book a tour guide in advance but are already physically on campus

Products that inspired us:

Sky:the Children of Light Initially, we want to build a networking game like Sky that allows non-college students to interact with students on campus and get some insider views. We soon realized its impracticality since it requires a strong server and a competent back-end developer. It is also unnecessary to solve this problem with this big of a scale.
Uber: Matthew suggested creating an "order" for campus tours. A college student, like a takeaway worker, can go to the designated area and start a session, no mapping/dropdown needed. Sadly, this points to a mobile app that we are currently not skilled enough to fulfill.

What it does

Nearby campus tourers would get a notification if someone requested to tour a building on the tour guide's campus, and a link would be sent to the tourist with contact info to meet their guide and chat with them on facetime for all the information they would ever need about their new campus.

How we built it

We used python and flask to code with Twilio API initially, then transitioned to Twilio Flow!

Challenges we ran into

We turned to building a website. We envision something like link that creates a login/signup for users as either a college student or a high school student. No action on the platform can occur except the identity of the user is already recorded in the database in case non-college students take orders. However, campus is really big with a lot of buildings and rooms. Tracking locations on a mobile app would work much better than website which requires painful list of all options in the code. (We also considered asking high schoolers uploading screenshots of google map and letting college students to manually select and filtering orders, but it will discourage user participation). Unfortunately, we don't have back-end developers who can code mobile apps.
We turned to Twilio, which allows us to build connections with mobile users through text messages instead of an app. This would solve the problem of the intricacies of the website. However, none of us have any prior experience with flask or twilio.
So, uh, Twilio crashed 8 hours before the submission. Luckily, it saved our work!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The logo integrated Cam (for campus and camera, since most services would be video call) and ants (enthusiastic helpers) in a way that reflects the purpose of our project. We hope to increase inclusivity by providing college students with volunteer/part-time job opportunities using this product. Creating a new, original program for the first time to solve a problem. We are proud to have participated in Mhacks 15 and have something to show for it!

What we learned

Matthew: Using Twilio was very difficult at first since I was coming at it with beginner HS programming knowledge, but as the nights went on I gradually learned more and more and discovered several APIs that would automate trivial tasks so I could spend more time doing the troubleshooting I needed. Of course, I realized this too late, but now I know what to do for my future hackathons, and the importance of preparing by learning the API beforehand, haha! While I wasn't able to finish the project in time due to lack of experience, I have realized just how much more there is to learn, and broadened my view of the coding space in general! For my first hackathon, I think the most valuable thing was the new experience I had gained with my team. I hope to keep working on the project, and who knows, maybe we can build something really helpful for a lot of people.

Meiyao: I learned that being able to design doesn’t make you a front-end developer. In real life, we need to turn prototypes into reality using codes and need to sacrifice many functions and visual components along the way. I also realize how shallow my understandings in figma, Adobe illustrator, and design overall were. many crash courses on logo design, shape exclusion, and figma/AI tutorials lol.Through Mhacks, I was forced to figure out how to work with other developers with the limited skill set that I have. I’m motivated to learn html, css and java-script to make my projects come into reality. Collaboration skill is also a huge takeaway from this project. Our project plan was polished by many discussions. Everyone has something to offer and teach, so we also learned from each other.