youCode2025: Arc'Together

ArcTogether.mov

Inspiration

Many people are eager to learn activities like climbing, hiking, or backcountry skiing but hesitate due to expensive lessons or lack of guidance. Additionally, outdoor enthusiasts often stay within their own circles—skiers with skiers, climbers with climbers—missing opportunities to connect across various outdoor activities.

Inspired by Arc’teryx’s mission of "Giving Back," we asked: "What if sharing skills could become the currency of connection?" Arc’Together was created to break down barriers, foster mentorship, and make outdoor adventures more accessible and social, aligning with the purpose of promoting outdoor connectivity within our community!

What It Does

Arc’Together is a skill-sharing platform where outdoor enthusiasts or beginners can:

• Host / Teach and Join skill-based activities (ex : "Intro to Rock Climbing," "Beginner friendly North Van hiking Session").
• Earn Learning Points by teaching, which can be redeemed for lessons or various Arc’teryx partnered merchandise such as gift cards,
• Build an outdoor story by documenting skills learned and connections made through shared group outdoor photos, experiences and sharing what skills you’ve learned / exchanged after each event. By turning knowledge into a tradable resource, we create a self-sustaining cycle of generosity and growth in outdoor communities.

How We Built It

Tech Stack: Built a Web Page frontend with React and Tailwind along with a MongoDB backend for real-time updates of each outdoor event posted and user logins. Gamification: Integrated a learning points and skills exchange system to encourage participation.

Challenges We Ran Into

One of our beginning challenges was coming up with the idea of outdoor skill exchange and how we can make it engaging and tie the community of pre-existing outdoor enthusiasts and people seeking to explore new sport activities. In which we developed a solution to make this an interactive reward system.

What is next for Arc'Together

In the future, we want to create user profiles more intuitive and have more features that allow users to connect with more people! Profiles will transform into dynamic outdoor portfolios that show skills mastered, activities participated in and hosted, and connections made.

New features like achievement badges and perhaps in-app messaging will make communication or changes of plans for the event easier, keeping the community engaged between adventures.

How to Run This Project

To run the frontend, do:

cd frontend
npm run dev

To run the backend, do:

cd backend/src/config
node app.js

NOTE: For the database to work properly, you will need a .env file in /backend with the following config:

MONGODB_URI=<your-mongodb-uri-here>
PORT=<your-port-here>