Binghamton Club Tools Extension

Inspiration

We were inspired by the book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in this book there is a strong emphasis on how we are all mortals and without working together properly in an organization society as we know it will fall. This has become ever more important in our increasingly connected world, where people are constantly in contact and need to keep their matters in order. Our goal was to follow in Zarathursta's footsteps and find ways to integrate better into society through better club management, and encouraging people to keep in contact with each other constantly.

As E-Board members of various clubs ourselves, we have realized the importance of intuitive software and programs that make management simple. Currently, many clubs use Google Suite applications to organize their work, but this is more complicated than it should be. The school already has a website for club events, so why not expand it to include club management and outreach? That's where our revamp comes in!

What it does

Our extension to B-Engage creates a more informative club landing page and integrates club management tools into a newly created section. In the club management section there will be various data visualizations, from club attendance, budgets, events, and much more! With our intuitive data visualization, AI club boards will be able to sort through their data, find trends, make predictions, and simplify the data collection process. There will no longer be any guesswork or long hours made finding trends in Excel sheets, but a simple click of a button!

In addition, we are looking to introduce a point system into B-engaged, as students attend events they will earn points, and the more points a student has by the end of the semester they can redeem them for something. We hope that the university will take charge and offer possible discounts or prizes based on the number of points. Our goal would also be to have more popular clubs earn more points and have priority when booking rooms. This would create more friendly competition between clubs and encourage students to keep on going. Wooo hoooo!

How we built it

To build our app we used a variety of different web-development tools. Originally we took a look at the current B-engaged website and noticed that it was written in the popular HTML framework Bootstrap. Noticing this we decided to follow in its steps, learning the bootstrap framework and understanding how simple and intuitive it was to build a website. We designed a few different web pages and from there thought about how to integrate some sort of AI. To do this, we found Streamlit libraries and LmStudio, both of which offer ease of use in integrating AI into websites. From there on we built the rest of our websites and tried our best to make them look user-friendly. We ended up finishing quite a few pages but unfortunately ran out of time near the end and only created the data visualization tool.

Challenges we ran into

Throughout our project we ran into quite a few challenges, especially understanding how to integrate Python into our HTML documents. Both Streamlit and LM Studio create non-static webpages that can not be hosted in the same way as a regular webpage. We went through many different methods and found that hosting the websites on their own is much simpler for our project and decided to follow that route.

Also, this was the first time many of us were exposed to using Bootstrap, this created many challenges such as understanding the ins and outs of how flex containers and padding worked which created lots of problems in writing out our code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our final product, the websites look sleek and modern and very appealing to the eyes. In addition, our technical skills have advanced learning skills like AI creation, Data visualization, and web development front-end.

What we learned

Throughout the project, our biggest gain was learning about the many different tools that offer AI services for relatively simple amounts of code. LM Studio specifically which offers a way to create Unique AI services that create different levels of responsive and extreme security.