Inspiration
Our goal for BoilerBets is to bring the sports community at Purdue University together. An immense amount of college students follow sports to bring joy and high spirits into their lives. Due to the pandemic and many students being more isolated than in prior years, the sports community at Purdue University has significantly diminished. We were inspired by this and decided to use our skills to solve this challenge.
What it does
Our project addresses this issue by creating a platform which brings together followers of a range of professional sports leagues. While we were brainstorming ideas to address this challenge, we recognized that the majority of professional sports fans are interested in sports betting. We decided to create a non monetary sports betting app which students can utilize to make connections with other students who are just as interested in professional sports.
How we built it
For this project, we utilized flask as our framework. To create the frontend, we used HTML. For the backend, we used Python with flask and flask-sqlAlchemy. This allowed us to run a website and code it using python while using sql for our database.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into many challenges throughout the last 36 hours in different areas of the project. To begin, many of our challenges took place in the frontend. Most of us weren’t as experienced in developing frontend and our multitude of issues were indicative of it. Throughout the frontend development process, we ran into many small errors which took hours to fix. Some of these were as simple as formatting and sizing issues and others were more based around issues using git and different HTML hacks. Our backend challenges were just as tough. We spent a large portion of our time making the backend communicate with the frontend. We also did not have a lot of experience using sql and flask, so there was a steep learning curve. Through trial and error, we were able to understand how all these separate programs communicated with each other.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Throughout the entirety of this lab, we were exposed to various different tools and technologies that are utilized in common web applications. We learned full stack techniques and shortcuts that we would otherwise not know from purely classroom knowledge. On the frontend specifically, we were able to successfully build a fairly secure interface, where we were able to seamlessly transfer data to the backend. On the backend, we were able to understand the various different tools such as models that exist with frameworks such as flask.
What we learned
We learned how to utilize simple languages such as HTML and CSS formatting, and implement them into complex and well-developed frameworks such as Flask. On the frontend, we learned what looks good and what doesn’t in terms of layout, and on the backend, we learned the organizational structure that is expected from different tech and the tips that help easily move data from one source to another. More specifically, we learned how GET and POST requests work.
What's next for BoilerBets
Moving forward, we will build on this project and grow our span of users at Purdue University. Hopefully we will bring the sports community closer together!
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