Team SouthcoderspresentCultureConnect
CultureConnect Demo Video
Connect with Culture, Connect with Community
CultureConnect is a community-focused hybrid application for iOS and Android. It provides a platform on which users can host and attend culture-based events.
Multiculturalism is increasingly common in our society, but people still struggle to find and explore their local communities. Our app aims to bring these communities together and allow people to discover new cultures, and share their own.
With CultureConnect, adventure is made easy. Users can create a unique profile, log in securely, and experience a world of culture at their fingertips. Our location-based search feature provides an instant view of events in your local area, both as a convenient list and on an interactive map. To find events further afield, users can filter by distance, increase their search radius, choose a new area by postcode, or simply explore the integrated map.
If there are any questions or concerns about an event, our instant messaging feature gives users direct contact with their host. They can register their attendance for an event with the ‘attending’ button, available on every event page, and click that same button to cancel. Conditional formatting makes this clear and easy to navigate.
Hosting events is as simple as filling out a form, and if an event cannot go on as planned, the delete button will remove it from the app. Users can customise their profiles at any time, and navigation is made easy with our navigation bar at the bottom of the app. For comfortable browsing, we have also implemented full light and dark mode integration.
The Team
Billy Langdown
Karisan Mathanaruban
TJ Jack
Joravar Singh Punia
Ward Sarkhan
Technologies
Our Tech Stack: React Native, React Native Paper, TypeScript, Supabase, Expo, Expo MapView, Expo Go, Postcodes.io, Visual Studio Code, Xcode, Git, GitHub, Slack, Discord, Trello, Excalidraw
We chose React Native because it is cross-compatible with iOS and Android devices, and our team was already comfortable designing websites with React, hence React Native seemed appropriately challenging while still being transferrable.
Similarly, we chose TypeScript because we were already confident in our JavaScript capabilities, therefore it posed a reasonable challenge without falling outside of our remit for a short and intensive project.
We decided to use Supabase for our backend, as we wanted to explore cloud-based computing services and we needed relational databases for our mobile application, which Supabase provided with comprehensive documentation.
We also found Expo provided the best solution for running our application with maps integration and hybrid compatibility.
Challenges Faced
Finalising our tech stack proved challenging to our group, as we were very enthusiastic about pushing ourselves to learn new technologies, however, we found due to time constraints it was more effective to work with the tech stack we chose.
There was a learning curve to use new frameworks, but as a team, we adapted to push through and successfully incorporate these frameworks into our app.