Book Finder

Inspiration

How many times have you wished you could talk to other college students to see if they're selling the book YOU need for the class to avoid having to pay the full price? This has happened to our members before and while eBay, Craigslist, and Amazon exist, we wanted to create a website just for college students that allow them to buy only the books they need, from the people they choose.

We want to make it easier for college students to buy college textbooks or reading books at an affordable price. Sometimes the books that we need to buy don't have access to rent and it becomes harder to get it for a cheaper price.

What it does

As soon as you open the website, there is a GetStarted button that takes you to log in or sign up for an account. Once you sign up, you are prompted to the page with "secondary" Home Page where you can either buy books if you already know what you are looking for, sell books if you are trying to get rid of the book you have, update your profile where the student can enter information about their major/university, or if they aren't sure, they can get help, which allows the student to find the book they are looking for manually. The seller will upload the book and add related details to make it easier for the buyer.

When the buyer clicks to buy books, they are prompted to the search engine where students will enter the name of the book they are looking to find. A list of available books with their price and a button to allow them to contact the seller if they wish to bargain more or for delivery information are displayed to the user. To respect the seller's privacy to avoid issues, the buyer sends a message to the seller, which is directly sent to the seller's email without revealing it to the user. If the user is really struggling to remember the book, they can look up their university and when they click on their university, they are prompted to the page where they can choose their major. They can choose the professor they have for that major and what books that professor required them in the past, the information we obtain from surveys. During all these, the user can click back to their profile to update their information about their university and major.

How we built it

We first brainstormed ideas for what we would create and how we would go about implementing it. The next step was to draft and design a prototype website. We did this using Google Slides. Once we felt our prototype was finished, we used GitHub for code collaboration to build the home page of our site.

Challenges we ran into

We had another great idea that we wanted to implement. However, we thought that this idea would be more helpful for students in the long run since they can first check with other students to see if anyone has the book before paying the full price for it. Another challenge was figuring out the logistics since this is all our team members' first hackathon. We were struggling to figure out prototypes, how to work on the code, etc.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

In our Google slides, we made it so that when a user clicks on a "button, " it takes them to the necessary slide. We are proud of our prototype since we worked so hard to put it together, perfecting it to the last detail. Also, most of us were not familiar with GitHub, so we were able to utilize it and figure it out by working together.

What we learned

Since the Axe Hacks Hackathon was majority of the team's first hackathon, there were quite a few things all of us learned. We learned how to use GitHub to collaborate, HTML and CSS to design our home page, and how to use Google Slides to make a prototype website. We also learned how it was important to communicate with each other as well as how to balance the work and between team members and hold each other accountable when everyone is not meeting up in person.

What's next for Book Finder

We will now be actively working with our team to code for this website. We have already coded for the homepage and are working on the other pages. Surely, we will make this a reality for students.