Rachel M. Dennis
ABSTRACT
Gratitude, according to Oxford Language, is “the quality of being thankful; readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness.” One way to express gratitude is through community service, however, we found that high school and college students find it difficult to access service opportunities, especially when busy with school and other extracurricular activities. After completing eight in-depth interviews, we found students had difficulty in finding opportunities that sparked their interest, contacting organizations, as well as keeping track of their hours for organizations such as service clubs or college Greek life. To solve these problems for students, we created VolunteerSpot: an app that allows high school and college students to easily find service opportunities at the tip of their finger. VolunteerSpot utilizes an interface for volunteers, where they can filter through service opportunities by category, and an interface for organizations, who can post job opportunities. The app employs a messaging feature for communication between groups, a review widget, and can filter service opportunities by category and proximity to the user. We hope that by creating VolunteerSpot, students can use our app to give back to their community and express gratitude in an easy and interactive way.
Supplemental Material
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