betterCorq

Homepage
Finished Schedule

Inspiration

Corq's headache-inducing UI/UX and inability to filter events based on your availability inspired us to create betterCorq. By making the catalog of campus events easier to navigate, we hope to promote more attendance to SBU's amazing clubs!

What it does

Instead of having to scroll through countless, unsorted events, you can upload a photo of your schedule and our AI will transform it into a customizable version. You can click and drag on top of this schedule to further edit your busy and free time. Our events catalog, directly pulled from SBEngaged, will update based on your availability, showing only the events occurring during your free time. Selecting the events you're interested in will make them pop up in your customizable schedule, and you can see how they will fit into your week.

How we built it

First, we drafted the framework of our website on Canva and scraped the data from SBEngaged through the website's inspector. Then, we split our team into 2 people working on the frontend and 2 working on the backend. For the frontend, we created the skeleton of our website using HTML, making it more appealing and user-friendly using CSS. For some of the functionality, we used JavaScript. On the backend, we used OpenRouter API to scan the user's schedule and transform it into a customizable version, as well as Python to handle all of the data management to compare the user's free time to event times. To connect our backend to the frontend, we implemented the RESTful API functions with the Python framework Flask.

Challenges we ran into

Downloading each others' programs from GitHub proved to be challenging. We struggled to download all of the necessary applications and imports, like Flask, for our code to run. In fact, one of the versions of our project only ran on MacOS, not Windows, which we spent several hours trying to solve. The most challenging problem we ran into, though, was adding the feature that sorts events based on your free time. We couldn't make this feature as robust as we wanted because we ran out of time, partially due to the aforementioned issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was our first hackathon and we entered this project as complete beginners with barely any knowledge about HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Python, or APIs. However, we actually ended up making a functional website and learned a lot in the process.

What we learned

We learned a lot of HTML/CSS, JavaScript, and Python, as well as how to use APIs, data scraping, and various Python libraries. We also learned the process of frontend and backend development, and the communication needed for all of our code to work together.

What's next for betterCorq

We would like to make the AI detection for extracting data from the user's uploaded picture more accurate by training the AI more. Also, we would like to add more customization, like filters for interests, majors, cultures, etc, and implementing the core function of suggesting events based on availability better. It would also be cool to turn this into a mobile app just like Corq, but better.