While researching for this Hackathon, we discovered a study on Psychology Today, which found that non-parental mentoring significantly affects positive youth development. After further research into this topic, we were shocked to find that teen girls and non-binary individuals had a considerably harder time managing stress than teen boys, partly because of a lack of steady role models. To bridge this gap, we created our solution, Mentorly, with hopes of providing mentors to young women and underrepresented genders for career advice, puberty support, sexuality crises, home-life troubles, and overall life guidance.
Mentorly is a web app/friendly mentor finder designed to help you find a role model that suits your interests. Within the website, you can connect with a mentor that suits your interests, journal to mark down thoughts you want to share with your mentor, join fun online events, seek advice from qualified mentors on a forum and meet new people. Youtube Pitch Video
We built Mentorly using Javascript, CSS, and HTML. We designated certain pages to different individuals while maintaining consistency through constant Discord check-ins.
We ran into many challenges throughout our time coding, but we were able to step back, examine the issue and debug with grace. Sometimes the error would occur in typos. For example, during the early stages of coding, the word “login” was spelled Incorrectly in the HTML file and the CSS file; thus, we could not correctly style the page until we realized the mismatched pages and fix the spelling error. Whoops!
The Event page caused another major problem as we tried to adjust the coffee CSS animations, scroll bars, and slideshow to align with our monitors, which were all different sizes. As a result of our different monitors, we spent much time trying to adjust the margins and sizes on the events page to accommodate our different screen sizes; we even tried brainstorming a solution to solve this issue. Nonetheless, our efforts prevailed as we solved this problem through discord, with each of us sharing our screens and implementing more percentages rather than exact pixels.
Lastly, another major problem we faced was the nav bar. Initially, our team made two separate nav bars, and when we eventually decided on one, the bar refused to be sticky; we solved this issue with some advice by changing the z-index. Once it was applied, the web app ran nicely, and we could focus on fixing smaller HTML issues.
We are proud to have completed a fully aesthetically pleasing website with many functioning parts within time constraints, especially since this is our first hackathon. All of us pushed our skills to the limits with CSS animations and new techniques. Debugging through mass efforts and organized teamwork was a task that we could handle, and we remain surprised we did so effectively. We put our all into making this an easy user experience and an effective website with easy-to-understand features. All in all, we are all delighted with how our website turned out and are so excited for more hackathons in the future.
We learned how to push files onto Github, some new CSS animations, and how to create a functional login page. Most importantly, we have learned that even the hardest errors can be fixed with teamwork.
In the future, we hope to expand our webapp to include more in-person events, such as board game nights and movie nights, which can be hosted in various locations. We also plan to add more features like mood trackers. Furthermore, we want to expand the number of mentors Mentorly has to create a team of diverse mentors with various skills so young women and binary individuals have a variety of mentors to choose from and connect with! Ultimately, we hope to create a community of real-life mentors and mentees that will positively impact young women and binary individuals.
Your friendly mentor finder: Mentorly <3