Inspiration
As Purdue Freshman, all of us have experienced confusion within the housing process. Recognizing this as an issue that future students would grapple with, we were inspired to create a program that mitigates this issue.
What it does
Our program takes six inputs to produce a list of Purdue's dorms ranked by best match. The inputs are a ranking of the attributes importance to the user, the user's biological sex, whether the user wishes to live in gender inclusive housing, whether the user wants to live in all male/female housing, what type of shared bathroom situation the user prefers, and a ranking of what the user's preferred roommate quantity is. With these inputs, the data is then sent into an algorithm that creates a ranked list of dorms for the user based on our custom made database. Finally, this data is presented to the user in a ranked list, complete with image of the dorm and percent match to the user's preferences.
How we built it
To complete our project, we split our team into two main groups: frontend and backend. Our frontend team worked on creating a intuitive user interface that was aesthetically pleasing and functional on both desktop and mobile devices. Our backend team developed a database of residence hall attributes, and based on this created a javascript function that took the inputs from the frontend and computed a ranked list of all residence halls using a weighted algorithm.
Challenges we ran into
(1) This was our first ever hackathon, therefore nobody on the team was aware of the scope of the project we could tackle. Overcoming this required genuine hours spent into brainstorming problems we observe around us that we could attempt to solve. That’s how the Purdue Housing Hub was born. (2) Not having prior experience in the languages – We have talked about overcoming this challenge across multiple responses. In summary: we learnt on the job!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
During this project, our team was able to overcome our lack of experience, and we are incredibly proud of that! By creating a database within Purdue’s housing options, we were able to use the data-points available to us to design a power ranking system (first in a google-sheets file and then implemented into the website) which we then used to create our final metric. Lastly, just the ability to distribute the work across all 4 people and complete the project within the time-limit was an overall satisfying feeling that we’ll carry with ourselves for the foreseeable future.
What we learned
Going into this project, most of our team had no knowledge in HTML or CSS. Through the development process, we were given a great amount of experience in these languages, enough to ultimately create a functional website.
What's next for Boiler Housing Hub
Dynamic Data Structures – Since there is only a limited amount of data to parse through, we decided it would be more time efficient to collect all the data ourselves and store it statically through creating objects in the .js file. Overall, it would be helpful to have an algorithm which can take all the raw-data we used and convert it to the metrics the way we did from another file. Doing so can extend the applicability of the website to not just more housing options in Purdue, but also expand our horizons into other universities.
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