Book a Seat

Inspiration

Study spaces have been very full due to mid semester tests and assignments coming up. With room capacity restrictions and social distancing, there are less spaces available and it can be difficult to find a spot when you really need to study. So instead of wandering around and stressing about where you can study, you can use this web app to reserve a study spot and relax knowing that there is a seat reserved just for you.

What it does

Essentially the web app allows students to reserve a study seat or a computer in a lab at certain locations that the university has allowed for booking. Students can choose the date, time, location and specific seat they would like to reserve. You can view existing bookings and create new bookings.

What is it?

Our web app is essentially a service that universities can subscribe to which helps manage study areas that have become overly crowded due to room capacity restrictions and social distancing. The web app can be accessed by students through the main link or can be added to university portals for easy access. Tables will have a small light, 'green' to indicate available and 'red' to indicate reserved or computers will have a message indicating the vacancy of the seat. Students can only book one slot at the same time e.g 9am Monday and are able to make bookings for the week. Students can only have existing bookings of 3 slots for a day, but can make additional bookings after their slot is over. Slots can be chosen as 30 minutes, 60 minutes or 120 minutes, perfect for the awkward hour gaps in between lectures.

How we built it

We built this by first designing a general wireframe and then coding it using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. We collaborated using github and of course late night zoom calls.

Challenges we ran into

We had a lot of amazing ideas so it was difficult to choose which idea we should continue with.

It was difficult to actually show the options that users were wanting to select. One way is to use PHP however, due to the time constraint, we weren't able to complete this and instead have had to hard code all the selected options.

We spent a lot of time making a back end and decided that it wasn't necessary to include.

Collaborating online is definitely a lot harder than talking face to face and working together. However we were able to overcome issues by using zoom and screen sharing to help each other.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Completing this website in time! We only started late Friday night. We all have university assignments to focus on too so there was not a lot of time that we could commit to this project. But we still managed to finish in time :)

The website is very user friendly and easy to use.

What we learned

Save versions along the way and commit to github after each step! With many people editing the same files, there was some conflicts and lost progress. We also learn to divide up the work more evenly and communicate with each other about what we are doing to avoid clashing.

What's next for Book a Seat

Change a few formats to better suit mobile devices! This should be easily accessible for all students so it would be great to be able to view things clearly on phones too.

We also want to be able to sort locations by vacancy. This means that rooms with the most space will show up first. From the location page, when picking the room, you'll also be able to see the number of vacant seats next to the room so you know how many seats are available.

First time user? No worries. Upon sign up, we will guide you through the booking system like a tutorial to help you navigate through your first booking. We will do this by making speech bubbles near each option with a small description about what to do.

We want this to be for Australia and New Zealand students but who's stopping us there? Let's expand to the whole world. Upon expansion, we'll add more languages and more features such as group bookings and a virtual layout of the seats with the doors and windows to help you better visualise where your seat actually is in the room. Also select if you would like a seat that has an accessible power adaptor to charge while you're studying.

We understand there are some options similar to this in universities in UK and USA however, most of them appeared outdated and aren't as easy and straightforward to use as our web app :)