Apps for Good Project
Apps for Good is a project we do in the second half of the year in which students identify a real-world problem and design, build, and present a mobile or web application that addresses it. The sections below describe my project's problem, target audience, solution, minimum viable product, and the additional features that bring the app together.
Problem
STEM events, internships, clubs, and enrichment programs often go unnoticed by students and parents. Information is scattered across school newsletters, organization websites, social media, and magazines, making it difficult to reliably discover high-quality opportunities in a specific town or region.
Target Audience
Beacon is targeted towards students of all ages who are in search of local STEM opportunities. This app is also available for parents that want to locate events for their children or relatives that are low-cost, nearby, and/or easy to access. On the organization side of things, this app allows organizations to push their events to students and get the traffic and attention that they deserve.
Solution
Beacon brings students and local STEM organizations into one place. A student does a quick one-time setup for their preferences and then sees a filtered grid of nearby STEM clubs, events, and volunteering, with one tap to open details, visit the organization's website, or report a bad listing. Organizations sign up with their basic info, get manually verified in order to keep listings real and accurate, and then use a dashboard to create, edit, draft, and publish events. They have a live Website Visits counter that shows which listings are actually pulling traffic. The result is that students and STEM programs end up one tap apart instead of separated by scattered flyers.
Minimum Viable Product
- Verified STEM organizations can manually input, update, and delete events. These events will be displayed to users as a list based on their preferences.
- Organizations must create accounts to submit or edit events. Organizations must pass an initial verification process to input events. After a simple automatic verification process, organizations can be manually verified.
- Students have the ability to filter opportunities in the database. Initial preferences are saved locally, and preferences can be changed at any time with instant response.
Other Features
Students can report events. Tap the report icon on any event card and pick a reason from a fixed list (Incorrect information, Spam or scam, Inappropriate content, Duplicate listing, Other) with optional free-text details.
Outbound link tracking. Each event has a "Visit Organization Website" button. When a student taps it, the app opens the link (new tab on web, external browser on Android) and increments a websiteVisits counter on that event in Firestore. The org dashboard then shows total Website Visits as a metric card. So orgs get analytics on which listings are pulling traffic, not just a static list.
Auto-resume on relaunch. After the first session, the app remembers whether you were a student or an approved org and skips the welcome screen entirely on the next launch. It goes straight to the student browse screen or the org dashboard. Approval status is re-checked on every launch, so a pending or revoked org is signed out and routed back to the welcome screen automatically.