Inspiration
Our inspiration comes from hoping that we can improve the quality of life of seniors in retirement homes while also aiding in young students' education. Mental health for seniors is not widely discussed, especially when compared with the support offered for other age groups, even though it is a prominent issue. We know there are seniors in our community that do not have lots of family to visit them, are not able to travel easily outside of their retirement home, or miss living independently. It is our hope that we can improve the quality of life, and mental health, of seniors by giving them extra purpose in their lives, someone to talk to, and a task to complete.
What it does
This will be achieved by pairing someone from a retirement home with a student to be pen pals. A teacher or retirement community manager will sign up their organization and will then be able to distribute usernames and passwords to those participating. This will limit the amount of work the children and seniors will have to do in order to sign up. The participants will send letters back and forth with their randomly chosen pen pal. This will all be done while keeping the participants anonymous to each other by only sharing their first names with their chosen pen pal.
How we built it
We chose to use react.js as our frontend while python as our backend. The backend server connects to Postgresql and runs the queries needed.
Challenges we ran into
We had a few problems with React fetch API caused by HTML form and React onChange conflicting between themselves, but we were able to get help and fix the problem. Also, we spent quite some time on discussing the way to pair students with seniors (should they be able to have more than one pair, how to deal with people who have no pairing, etc)
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very proud that we were able to implement sending letters between users. We discussed how we were going to do this for a long time and we are so proud we were able to finish this before the deadline.
What we learned
By creating DearPenPal we learned how to work as a team efficiently and effectively. We were very aware of the deadline and worked really hard to figure out how we would work together to achieve our goals in time. We learned how to communicate well, problem solve together, and keep each other motivated.
What's next for DearPenPal (maybe-winner)
Some future projects that we would have liked to implement in DearPenPal is some sort of content moderation tool so that inappropriate content cannot be sent from either pen pal intentionally or unintentionally. We would also like to have a way to verify the organizations participating so that there is some accountability for who is signing up.
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