EduCafe

Inspiration

As we gathered together on the second floor of the SOCH, the room settled into a moment of melancholy*. Under this silent spell the waves of our neighbor snores crashed into our eardrums like the Great Waves off Kanagawa.

"Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face! Clouds of the west—sun there half an hour high—I see you also face to face.

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me! On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose, And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose."

T. S. Eliot

Millions bustle about the streets of Manhattan everyday, yet I have felt the most lonely amongst this crowd. While we are all so connected today, we feel so distant, hiding behind online identities and expressionlessly sending emojis. This motif of human disconnect is so deeply branded upon our society and now extends its corrupt claws towards our sanctuaries of learning. Students no longer freely express their thoughts and teachers cannot speak their mind, bound by the shackles of academic formalities. We must rekindle the flames of free learning by first conquering the walls of awkwardness by sharing a nice, steaming, cup of coffee together.

EduCafe

What it does

EduCafe connects students and professors together, within the scene of an informal coffee chat or group discussion, allowing for connections to foster without the pressure of tense formality. By having a slide feature, the student is able to slide left or right on coffee chats and events hosted by professors, and then register for those of interest. The student will then be notified of whether they were randomly selected amongst all of the the applicants to attend this event.

How we built it

We developed the front end with Swift and created the backend and database with Firebase.

Challenges we ran into

WIFI PROBLEMS. + One of our biggest problems was being able to settle down on an idea to pursue in the brainstorming stage. Because the majority of us are first time hackers, we were not as familiar with the type of workflow and time management that we should have been implementing from the beginning. However, once we were able to identify a problem that we were passionate about solving, we were able to get our project up and going.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are most proud of the idea that we came up with in the end as it is both a cause that we genuinely believe in and would want to continue working on in the future. We are also very proud of how fast we were able to adapt to the Swift work environment.

What we learned

Time Management, humor

What's next for EduCafe

We plan to expand towards graduate students in order to connect them with professors and undergraduates as well. In addition to this, we hope to implement our app into large corporations where interns and new employees will be able to connect with other co-workers and integrate into their company culture seamlessly. Our goal is to take away the pressure of formally meeting new people, for the purpose of stimulating human connection.

In the future, we are hoping to work with our respective schools to try and bring EduCafe to our campuses.