Torch

Knowledge is our Flame: Keep it Strong and Pass it On

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Inspiration

Many students in public schools do not have access to formal STEM Education, specifically for computer science, whether through Computer Lab during the day or AP Computer Science courses. This is especially true in underserved communities and in an age where diversity in STEM has become a trailblazing movement, students should be able to see themselves in these tech industries and have a community to support them on their way towards that goal.

What it does

Torch is an online web platform for high school and college students to connect with mentors who are industry professionals in technology to work through coding challenges together, explore careers in STEM, and gain advice.

Blog: Students can join and post to different groups to share resources // Chat bot integration: Chat bot asks questions of the user (favorite course subject, age, experience, etc.) and directs them to the mentor best suited to serve their interest // Real-time chat application: Available for students to get answers to any questions in real-time

How I built it

We leverage the React javascript framework to build out our UI and connect to Firebase as a backend. In order to style our pages, we used the Material-UI library. For the chatbot we used Wit.ai to integrate it with the Facebook page.

Challenges I ran into

We all worked on different features and merging everything together created some merging conflicts but we were able to figure it out!

What I learned

Using Firebase as backend - Guillermo Incorporating Firebase functions to make API calls - Alicia Working with Wit.ai and Facebook Messenger chatbots - Raluca

Further development

Improve the chatbot functionalities and integrate it into the platform itself

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