Mariah Carey’s started defrosting, and the season of gratitude is upon us. From leading a hardworking project team and working with our amazing exec board to having tons of fun with the most supportive club members I could ask for, Spark has given me a lot to be grateful for this year. Keep reading to find out what we’ve been cooking, just in time for Thanksgiving.
🎉 Alumni Homecoming Event – November 16th
Dear Spark Alumni: If you’re in town, you’re invited to our annual Homecoming Dinner this Saturday at 6:30pm! We will be catering dinner on-campus — exact location will be sent out tonight or tomorrow. We would love to welcome you back to campus for this event to learn how you’ve been doing, as well as provide everyone with the opportunity to reunite with old friends and meet our new members. Eat, mingle, and celebrate Homecoming with us!
📘 Blue Curriculum Updates!
Our wonderful Blue VP Raphael Martinez and student mentors have been providing our newbies with a comprehensive bootcamp on software development and design. This semester, Blue is guiding students through the creation of an extended project that they will build upon as they progress through our course, as well as pairing them with each other to create a buddy system for support and accountability.
Our devs are currently learning HTML, CSS, and React, as well as learning Node and PostgreSQL. Our designers are learning about user research, user flows, wireframes, and lo-fi prototyping in Figma, and they are preparing to tackle UI design principles and user testing next. Both teams have started their final projects, which they will showcase at the end of this semester. We love to see it 👏
🍎 Red Projects
Our Red teams just delivered their midpoint presentations, and we couldn’t be more stoked to see the progress they’ve been making on their projects. Here’s a snapshot of what we have to look forward to at our end of semester showcase:
3D R/place
3D R/place is a collaborative digital art experiment that invites Penn students to create 3D art in a shared voxel grid. Inspired by Reddit’s r/place, our platform allows users to place colored voxels/blocks in a 3D space, building and shaping a dynamic digital canvas in real-time. The idea came about as a way to combine interactive 3D art with the social quirks of Penn's campus culture, letting students collectively shape a unique visual experience. At the end of the project, we’ll compile a timelapse showcasing the evolution of the art as the community builds it together. We hope to celebrate campus culture in a digital, dynamic, and interactive 3D landscape.
Philanthropia
Philanthropia is a startup looking to revolutionize giving. Users can create donation portfolios to spread their giving across multiple organizations and causes that they care about, instead of one or two. Philanthropia also provides information about each charity, allowing users to make informed decisions. This reduces inter-charity competition over donor acquisition and makes giving less stressful for users, leading to more impact. Penn Spark is collaborating with Philanthropia to build an onboarding flow that will walk new users through creating their first portfolio and understanding the platform, making it super easy to get started.
Penn Pin
Penn Pin is an interactive mobile application that motivates students to explore campus through real-time navigation, engaging content, and community-driven insights about their surroundings. Featuring an interactive graphic map, the app pinpoints users’ location and highlights nearby landmarks. Users can leave short comments and reactions ("pins") about various locations, whether it be the Ben Franklin Bench or DRL, and react to them by traveling near the landmark or viewing location-based ‘fun-fact’ popups and notifications. Designed to continually engage users while melding comfortably into their busy lifestyles, Penn Pin invites our school community to discover and share the stories that make campus home.
Stride
Spark is piloting a new initiative this year to increase our social impact on spaces outside of campus, ensuring that we use our talents and skills to give back to the Philadelphia community we are all a part of. Our social impact team is creating Stride, an app to improve the accessibility and ease of sustainable transportation use in Philadelphia. We are mapping the safest walking, biking, and Septa routes between destinations, as well as providing users with stats on their environmental impact. Our platform encourages them to connect (read: playfully compete) with friends to collectively maximize their use of sustainable transportation. We are excited to partner with the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commision and Clean Air Council in Philadelphia for market research and user testing as part of our community collaborations.
Come to our end-of-semester showcase on December 7 in Gutmann MPR if you want to be the first to try out our projects!
💕Your Turn
Tell us what you’re thankful for!
Interested in working with our team? Questions about what we do? Want to grab coffee with me? 👀 Email us all your thoughts at upennspark@gmail.com or find us on Instagram at @pennspark – we would love to hear from you!
Stay warm. Take care of yourselves. Until the next edition!
With love,
Meiling Mathur
VP External, Penn Spark 💌