The Idea behind Roses & Thorns

December 2019

During my Fall 2019 semester, I had the opportunity to take COMP 426: Modern Web Programming at UNC Chapel Hill. Through this course, I learned the essentials of web design, and gained knowledge in key programming and markup languages such as: HTML, CSS, Javascript, jQuery and JSON. As a final project, we were required to create a functioning web application that interacted with backend and frontend data stores and featured autocomplete suggestions, login and sign-in pages, creating/updating/deleting resources, and a third party API.

My amazing group consisted of: Natasha Vaidya, Tanvee Wakankar and Angelica Quintero. We decided to create Roses & Thorns, a website that would serve as a mental health journal for stressed out college students. We believe that having a space to share one’s personal thoughts is super important, as it will empower students to talk about their feelings, and hopefully feel less stressed :-) 

Through this application, users would be able to make an account and login, to view a personalized, private page.

Users can then go on to update their mood and have this stored in their account. In the feed, they can record their “rose” or high of the day. Each post has a submission box as well as a sliding scale to rank their emotions.

Users can also submit their “thorn” or low of the day, slide the scale on the lower end, and add that to the feed as well. The ranking on the sliding scale determines the color of the post. A darker green means that it was a positive post, whereas a lighter green/white means that it was a negative post.

Users can then go onto their personalized dashboard to view how their moods have changed over time. These graphs are particularly important to track where the highs and lows have been during a certain period of time. 

We have also featured a “positivity” quote board for our users to publicly generate and submit quotes. They can refresh the quote board to receive new quotes and daily inspiration, as well as submit quotes in the box below to add to the quote board above, for all users of the website to see. 

Roses and Thorns is ultimately a place where people of all ages can express their emotions and feelings, and track these in a personalized dashboard. Our last page offers more links to resources that provide help to mitigate stress. We also have an option to leave feedback to the page, so that we can constantly improve and create a better user experience for our website.