HomeBridgr

home page w/ postcard
homepage feed
student posts
new post UI
discovery tab w/ smart word analysis
user profile
login page

Inspiration

Moving away from home — especially to another state or country — can be exciting, but also deeply isolating. Many students struggle to stay connected with their families and communities back home. They want to share their new experiences, but cultural or geographical gaps often make it hard to communicate the small, everyday details that define life abroad. On the flip side, many families want to stay connected with their child and the college campus. We built BridgeLink to close that gap — using AI not just for convenience, but for empathy. Our goal was to create a space where students can share their lives authentically, and their families can understand and feel part of that journey.

What it does

BridgeLink offers both parents and children to stay connected through postcard sending, image posting, and a cultural context translator. It also is built with multilingualism in mind, with multiple support functions for English learners.

How we built it

Nextjs,Google Gemini, AWS Bedrock, Supabase

Challenges we ran into

AWS bedrock setup, social media feature debugging, and personalized logins.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating a working prototype that combines multiple tools we haven't worked with before, such as Gemini and Bedrock. Our app has exceptional functionality for a prototype, prioritizing multiple angles of functionality from specialized features like content summaries to standardized features like personalized login. It is also an idea that we haven't seen before, and we would be excited to use if it were a real app.

What we learned

We learned that social media apps are harder than they seem. They require a lot of error checking, edge case tests, compatibility conflict resolutions, and overall just a lot of features that aren't very cool but take a lot of time. We also learned how to collaborate on code in a more synergistic way with more people simultaneously editing code. Finally, we learned a lot about project management and how to divide up tasks and spend time efficiently.