XPLOR

Inspiration

Our team was inspired by Gina Raimondo, the governor of Rhode Island, who challenged participants of Hack@Brown to create and use technology as a force for social good. XPLOR facilitates users to easily find a volunteer activity they are interested in and help the world.

What it does

XPLOR makes volunteering as easy as a swipe! XPLOR exposes users to variety of volunteer activities in the local area. Events are filtered based on distance, age requirements, and fields of interest, such as environment, education, and children. The events are saved, and the app tracks user volunteer hours. User events are then saved directly to your phone's calendar.

How we built it

We decided to use Objective-C to build XPLOR. Most of our team were first-time users of the language! We created our own icons for filtering events, and also set the filters to be based on distance, age, and interests of the volunteer event. We used a swipe card library to create the events view and imported raw open data to populate each slide with pictures, event information, and times.

Challenges we ran into

We started off using the LinkedIn API with the aim of matching students with internships, and after five hours of going through their sample code, we deemed the venture a fail to start over again. It wasn't compatible with our app, and so we created a unique user form instead. Objective-C was also complicated to learn within the time span of the hack-athon.