College Socialization Advice

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Inspiration

As two college students at the University of Connecticut, we know firsthand the struggles that come with living in a completely new environment away from home. It can be extremely difficult to find new friends and keep yourself busy while at school. We wanted to create something that could benefit anyone finding themselves in the same situation, as this problem is much more common than people think. We wanted to take our own experiences at school and create something fun that can help others struggling too.

What it does

Our website has three options presented to the user. They can either receive a dare, seek advice for help finding friends, or look for fun activities to do with their friends at school. The options are presented by three buttons, which will then display an answer according to what the user chose. The dares are dares intended to help students branch out and do things they would not normally, in order to potentially make some new friends. The advice and activities are simply suggestions for the user in the hopes of helping them improve their college experience.

How we built it

We used html, css, and javascript in order to build a website that presents these ideas in a user-friendly way. We used a variety of stylistic techniques through css in order to make the website as accessible as possible. The majority of our website was built through html to create the buttons and text displayed. The functionality of the buttons to display the correct output was created by using javascript.

Challenges we ran into

At first we had a hard time being able to implement the functionality of the buttons leading to the intended output. We both were not extremely familiar with html or javascript, so we had to do some research in order to figure out exactly how to create what we intended to. Another challenge we faced was deciding how we wanted to showcase our idea. Specifically, we came up with the idea and had to talk to each other about how we wanted it to be presented.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have finished our website and created something that can potentially help people. A major part of computer science is being able to develop technology to help others, which is what we intended to do here.

What we learned

We became familiar with creating websites through different languages. It was cool to be able to create a website through code that we had written. Even though our website has a basic presentation, we were able to learn how to create it ourselves. Another important thing we learned was being able to make the website easy to use for the user. We learned to create our website in a way that is clean and simple for a user to understand how it works.

What's next for College Socialization Advice

Since we discovered we are capable of creating our own websites, we opened many potential doors for future projects. We aren’t exactly sure of where this will lead us, but we would consider expanding our current idea to be applicable to more people in more scenarios. We could also use what we have learned in order to create something totally new that can also benefit people.

Why is there a button? Why couldn’t we see all the answers right away?

Good question. The button forces each user to only see one answer at a time to allow the user to think deeply about what the answer means. We thought that seeing a webpage with 100 tips right away would overwhelm the user. We really want to make a lasting impact on each user beyond a few seconds, so one at a time fits best for us. Also, there’s some element of fun and surprise for which tip or dare the user would get.

Built With

• css
• github
• html
• javascript
• syncfiddle