STEMinists

Inspiration

As women in STEM, all of us are abundantly aware that we are in the minority. We developed this project in an attempt to encourage other young women who may be interested in pursuing a career in STEM. We decided to take inspiration from ADPList which is a website for connecting mentors and mentees. Our web application targets a smaller consumer group; specifically, women in or interested in STEM. The ultimate goal of the project is to setup a community of women who share similar interests and experiences in order to expand the support systems for women in STEM.

STEMinists is an online web application for connecting female mentors and mentees in to encourage more female participation in STEM fields and to help bridge the gap for the inexperienced. A form is used to sign up to be a member. The web application is backed by an algorithm that matches mentors and mentees together based on their common interests.

First we determined our goal for the application and it's core features. We brainstormed ideas for the design of the website and a name that encompassed what we wanted to accomplish with it. We decided, based on varying degrees of knowledge, on which programming languages, API's and tools we wanted to use. Then, with a working rough draft of the website pages, we began to code. Some group members contributed to the front end and others focused on the task of sending form information to the Firebase database. We used many resources found on the internet, each other and the SheHacks mentors as well to build the current version of the project.

We had much trouble setting up VS code to integrate with gitHub.
We had, naturally, had some debugging problems.
Some group members were using gitHub, React.JS and Firebase for the first time so there was a learning curve with that and it took more time.

One of our biggest challenges was incorporating the use of an online database (namely firebase) into our program. As a result, one of our greatest accomplishments is that we persevered through the onslaught of errors, confusion, and malfunctioning code to finally gain an understanding of how firebase works and actually use it for our project.
Another accomplishment is that we managed to complete a (mostly) functional web app in less than 3 days. Overall, we're very proud of the web app, even though there are things that still need improvement, and we're looking forward to displaying it on our github. Speaking of github, learning how to properly use github's version control features was one of the most valuable skills we could have acquired and it took a number of hours for us to figure out how to set it up and correctly utilize it. This is another accomplishment that we're very proud of. "
Finally, two out of four group members had never coded in React.js before, and yet we were all able to make a web application using said framework. We are very proud of how we helped each other through that.

Over the past few days, we've learned a lot of valuable technical skills required for coding. These skills include learning how to fully utilize github's version control features, using react.js to simplify code and make things more readable, and utilizing online databases such as firebase for storing data. Other skills that we've developed have been explaining and deciphering code, troubleshooting technical difficulties, and finding unique solutions to unexpected problems. We also honed our communication and accommodation skills as we were working from different time zones.

We hope to improve our website design. The login page can be improved by allowing members to log in using their google credentials. Also, we hope to add an about us page to the website.
We hope to fully implement the matching algorithm for mentors and mentees.
In the future we hope to add a STEMinists chat room feature where any user of the web application can chat with a mentor.

I worked on the front end and got some exposure to React.js. I helped debug code, learned how to use GitHub, and Firebase, and helped in sending form data to the database. It was truly a great learning experience for me.

Placid Akat
I worked mainly on the front-end, coding many of the layouts and helping to troubleshoot in css difficulties. I also coded some of the logic aspects requiring javascript, including printing a variable number of mentor cards, based on the number of mentors available.

Courtney Postma
I worked on the front end. Worked on the form page and also trying to get data from firebase to the recommendation page. It was my first time using firebase so it was a bit difficult but eventually figured it out with my team mates

Sayo Bamigbade
I like learning new and exciting things
Onosen Aziegbe

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