Inspiration
We work hard for three years and find ourselves equipped with non-essential skills that won't help us land any job anywhere. Hence mentorship and consistency is the reason behind succeeding in any field, but all mentors or alumnae from a college are too occupied to provide free mentorship to every student.
This is where we came up with the idea of creating an EdTech mobile application, "MentorMe", that connects students to mentors to get paid mentorship.
What does It do?
MentorMe is a platform that enables mentors (for, e.g. remote employees and fitness dieticians) to monetise their success by allowing students to receive paid mentorship from them.
Here is how it works:
Suppose someone recently got a 100K USD remote job offer as a software developer, and they don't have enough time to create a video course or mentor every kid.
They can create a paid event (e.g. 180 Days Of Development) on our platform where they will assign tasks to all community members each day along with the resources they followed for the same.
This way is easier for them to provide mentorship at scale, and students get the sure-shot path to achieve the same milestone.
How We Built It?
I and Tanmay have good experience creating end-to-end mobile applications using flutter and firebase. Together we won Smart India Hackathon as well this year.
We built MentorMe using the following tools:
FrontEnd: Flutter (framework), Dart(language)
Developer Tools: VSCode
StreamChat API for one-to-one and community chat
GitHub to manage the repository
Backend:
Firebase Cloud Firestore
Firebase Authentication
Firebase Cloud Storage and Functions
BLoC for state management
Challenges We Ran Into:
There were three challenges we faced:
Time Challenge
- We had to create an end-to-end mobile application that includes full authentication, user onboarding, creating events, integrating StreamChat API and a hell lot mooooreeee under only 2.5 days.
Design Challenge
- MentorMe is an entirely new concept for us, and we don't want to copy any of the features from the competition to maintain its uniqueness. So we decided to make an elegant and simple design on the go. Again under 2.5 days only.
Development Challenge
- We have experience with some features under it in the past, but some were entirely new for us. For example, payment checkout, and creating group channels for streamchat. Reading the documentation, then implementing it, and then fixing every bug that arises during the process is a pretty huge challenge in itself. Happy we did it :)
What did We learn?
We learnt how to delegate tasks amongst ourselves and take feedback to collaborate effectively.
We learnt how to code fast while using good practices like DRY, KISS and SOLID.
Essentially we learnt how to create an end-to-end mobile application in under 2.5 days while maintaining its consistency to scale further.
What's next for MentorMe?
The first thing we'll do right after the hackathon's over is roll out MentorMe on the play store, and take inputs and feedback from our friends on whether they would like to use it.
If they love what we're building and find it useful, we'll start working on this with the full thrust to scale it further so that no student will ever work on redundant technologies and get a sure-shot path to success.
Checkout our project here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UJcNFD3ZbiLXbmwupIw6oYhnVaXEvWJo/view?usp=share_link
Video URL: https://youtu.be/tbJnak3aK5o
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