Mental health is a very concerning issue amongst university students at the moment. Due to the Covid19 pandemic, students have to study on an online platform, socially distanced from their peers and the many on-campus learning resources. As a result, university can be an even more challenging experience for those who feel isolated or struggling to keep up with their work load.
Recently, the University of Toronto mourned the loss of a fellow student. The university responded by sending a list of professional mental health/wellness support to each student via email. While we do not undermine the impacts of these supports or the university's efforts in tackling this problem, we wish to allow students the opportunity to connect with fellow peers, so they can get some help from someone who is either facing the same problems as them, has faced them before, or is just willing to chat about anything. This is a particularly important problem these days as we are all distanced and have little opportunity to see, hear or connect with each other.
Our solution is an app that allows students the extra functionality to connect with fellow students from any program or university, while offering existing professional help. Users can choose to remain anonymous; he/she can browse through different universities and programs if they want one-on-one help from people in a specific field, for example, people studying in the same discipline as them. If they are facing an emergency, they are prompted to seek emergency professional help. Volunteers are those willing to provide mental health support, they must create account and provide a description of what sort of assistance they can provide(just some time to chat is fine!), so users can select who they want to talk with when they want peer support.
The website was built using Django for backend, HTML/CSS/Javascript for frontend, and Bootstrap. The website design is intuitive, each web page corresponds to an html page. CSS was used for styling. Django was used to store user information in our database.
For two of the three members, this was the first time using html/css/javascript in a project, as well as the first time being exposed to django. We had to learn the basics of the language as we progressed. The biggest challenge in implementation was chat functionality.
We are proud of tackling a mental health issue that raises a particular problem in the UofT community. We are happy that we learned some html/css/javascript and actually implemented it in a project.
As we are a team consisting mostly of beginner programmers, this was a great way to learn web development with Django in Python. We got to learn the difference between frontend and backend, how teams can collaborate on a coding project, and apply critical and creative thinking skills to solve a real world problem.
The next step would be to implement chat functionality. This was a challenge as the recent django channels which are required to do chat are broken. In addition, we could implement a recommendation list for students seeking help. Although all personal information is secure on our website, we are also trying to aim for more transparent privacy settings.