Have you ever wanted to plan something fun with your friends but always ran out of ideas? That's why we built "Let's Hang"! We saw inspiration with the simple web application when2meet, something we use all the time when coordinating group projects for classes. We understand that we all have busy schedules and it can be hard to put the effort in to coordinate and make it work. Let's Hang searches the web for fun places for students and young adults alike to hang out, including museums, cafes, bowling, and other attractions. Due to our unique location weighting process, our platform is able to reveal insights and suggest new locations that otherwise would not be obvious.
Our team wanted to build a project that would bring people together in an environmentally-sustainable way. We wanted to do this by eliminating the hassle involved in scheduling a time and place to meet up with your friends. By choosing a destination accessible by transit and other options, we reduce the hassle of driving, directly reduce automobile CO2 emissions, and connect friend groups and promote social interaction. After the COVID-19 pandemic we saw a shift to remote activities, "zoom games", and more. Now, we see Let's Hang as a tool for friend groups both new and old to connect as the pandemic recedes.
Our application consists of a landing page where the user is greeted with a friendly, easy to navigate interface to start their search for a hangout. Our application asks the user to pick a date, time, and maximum commute time to a "hangout". The application takes three addresses and then the user is able to start the hangout search. From here, the user is presented with the top picks of locations in a column on the left side of the screen and a map of the locations on the right. The user is able to view a summary of the hangout from here, including time, distance, and carbon footprint for all participants. The application works to intelligently discover places of interest based on geolocation factors and is powered by several Google services to ensure high reliability of results. This application is geared towards students and young adults and especially commuter students that may live far away from each other but still want to meet up outside of class.
Our web app uses Angular and Bootstrap for the front end, Node and Express for the backend, and MongoDB for the database. The backend also communicates with the multiple Google Maps-related APIs from Google Cloud including Places API, Geocoder API, and Directions API. We developed this project entirely during the hackathon with a devoted schedule.
We found that asynchronous code and chaining async functions for API calls was hard to get right and took a significant amount of time to debug than we had allotted for the project. Also, this was the first hackathon for two of us and the time limit was an adjustment.
We felt incredibly proud of being able to work together for this and get this project out to the community. We were able to work together very well and pick up several new technologies and tools in a short time frame. Our team consists of students from various backgrounds, yet we all managed to come together to deliver a cohesive, elegant application.
We advanced our technical skills of JavaScript and backend frameworks and APIs, but most importantly learned how to work well together as a team and communicate. We went into this project as a group, and we came out a team. We are all incredibly grateful for each other's effort in this project and support.
We want to pitch this idea to other students and see if they are as thrilled by it as we are. One of our group members frequents the Close School of Entrepreneurship that has backed student entrepreneurs at Drexel in computer science in the past. We'd like to see if there is value for this in the community to raise awareness of sustainable transit options powered by technology.