BookEd

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Inspiration

Remembering your school schedule is already hard enough. Remembering all your friends schedule's in addition to that is almost impossible. Our goal with this project was to create an application that would simplify interactions between friends by indicating and notifying the user when his friends are available. Furthermore, the task of deciding what to do is also simplified with the help of suggestions of events happening nearby.

What it does

A user logs into the app using his google account and is then brought to the calendar view page, where he/she can see their schedule for the day, as well as add any new time-slots. Underneath the calendar will be displayed the next available break and any recommended nearby activities. The activities suggested can range from eating out at a specific restaurant, to going to the movies or a park, to going to a last-minute concert.

How I built it

Our team decided to split the project into two main components: the front-end and the back-end. Being that we were 4 members in the team, two of them took on the task of creating a nice, user-friendly UI, while the other two were tasked with writing the application's API.

The user interface of the mobile application was coded in flutter.

The back-end was done all in JavaScript and is a REST-API. Most of the logic and algorithms behind our application were coded in this section. All the get and post requests called by the front-end performed the necessary steps and then returned a JSON object.

Challenges I ran into

The biggest challenge our team encountered was while creating the UI of the mobile application. At first, we tried using ionic angular to get the app started, but ran into several issues since no one on the team had any experience with that framework. After many hours of debugging and having little progress, we decided to switch to flutter for the front-end. This decision was a good one, since one of our members had already worked with it and was able help the team make some progress.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The biggest accomplishment was being able to quickly learn new technologies such as flutter, as well as working with new people since our team consisted of members who had never worked on a project together prior to this event.

The learning curve was relatively high, but the outcome was incredible and we are all proud of what we were able to accomplish.

What's next for BookEd

In the future, we had planned to create a group chat service for the user to easily be able to communicate with friends that share the same breaks, as well as friends who are in the same courses. BookEd could also serve as a study group creator by joining people registered in the same courses and sections.

Another plan for this mobile application was to extend all of its features offered to students to the workplace. This way, colleagues would be able to share their busy schedules to make time for stress-relief activities and others.