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Inspiration
When coming up with an idea, something that all of our group members could relate to was how difficult computer science, or any education for that matter, can be. Currently, many people studying computer science have a doom and gloom mindset where they believe they won't succeed after they graduate. This kind of thinking is something that every one of our members has experienced at one point or another but there are certainly other people who have this pessimistic or imposter syndrome kind of attitude. Seeing our friends, family, and classmates think like this has inspired us to make a project that helps people overcome this obstacle.
What it does
Our project, Paws Your Mindset, is a web application that assists the user in transforming their mindset from fixed to growth; that is, how to stop any negative thinking (including blaming others, their environment, the inability to persist through challenges, etc) but rather take full accountability and ownership to improve their overall quality of life. The website takes the user through 25 hypothetical questions which will consist of 5 different categories that make up the growth mindset. After answering all 25 questions, it will display a graph illustrating whether they have a fixed or growth mindset.
How we built it
We built our project based on the MERN stack. This includes MongoDB, Express, React, and Node. MongoDB was used for storing our questions and user answers in a database. Express was used to connect our back-end(the database) to our front-end(the website that the user interacts with). React was used to build the front-end webpage. Node was used for fetching data and error handling. Tailwind was also used for developing the aesthetic/ui of the site.
Challenges we ran into
One major challenge was figuring out how to merge the topic of education and interactivity. It was difficult for us to decide on something we were all passionate about, but this struggle is what helped us to realize that we all want to help others become the best version of themselves. Some other major challenges we had were learning React and MongoDB. These technologies were new to all of us so it took much of our time to learn them. The absolute biggest obstacle for us was combining the front-end and back-end. Building a website is not too difficult alone and adding data to a database is a similar experience, but figuring out how to add/request data from a website based on user input was a huge struggle.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
An accomplishment we are proud of is successfully putting all 25 questions, the category, and all the options onto the database. Finally seeing all the data we had on the front-end show up on the database was an exciting moment for us.
What we learned
The two major technologies we learned during this project were React and MongoDB. A concept that we learned was how to get input from a user and store it in the database(full-stack development).
What's next for Paws Your Mindset
A major feature we wanted to include is displaying a donut-style graph at the end to show the user what kind of mindset they currently have. One of our plans is to give the user ways they can improve their way of thinking based on how much/how little of a growth mindset they have. We also plan to add more questions to give a more accurate assessment of their mentality. Another plan we have for the app is to introduce it to students at the beginning of the school year and at the end so show their development toward a positive and healthy mindset.
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