Our team had prior experience working with Meet Hydrogen and understood their mission and objectives. We recognized that developing an app would not only serve as an educational tool but also as a marketing asset for the organization and its government and industry partners. To create an MVP prototype for the app, we analyzed feedback and materials from the previous year's roadshow and designed a simplified version with interactive quizzes and an about section leading to additional content that could generate website leads.

We performed small design sprints to ensure the UI designs were efficient and to facilitate smooth communication with developers to ensure timely feature releases. Adopting this approach allowed us to focus on gradually releasing more exciting features, such as the selfie-frame, educational quizzes, and flashcards.

Both apps were created natively using Kotlin and Jetpack Compose for Android and Swift with Swift UI on iOS. Creating a simple app with newest UI toolkits was fun, fast and satisfying for our team, and such applications can easily be expanded incorporating additional screens and navigation elements. We extensively utilized Firebase tools as the backend for managing app content and generating app links in QR codes.

These codes redirect users to the appropriate app store based on their platform, or open the quiz upon scanning a QR code at a specific location. Additionally, Firebase was used to send push notifications when we launched new educational features that can be explored after the roadshow. We choose Firebase because it allows significant flexibility in determining the app's content and release timeline, without waiting for complete backend work and can leverage the flexibility of a NoSQL database.