Inspiration

To help solve an expensive problem. University and college students have no choice but to spend a lot of money on textbooks - we wanted to ease the financial burden on these students.

What it does

Connects students with textbooks with students looking for textbooks.

For example, if I'm taking five courses a semester, there's a high chance that I won't be using a few of my textbooks at particular times. BookIT seeks to take advantage of this by enabling students to rent out their textbooks when they're not using them, while make some coin on the side.

How we built it

We built the backend using Ruby on Rails + MySQL. The user-facing side is an Android app.

Challenges we ran into

Good database design and feature extraction (given our problem).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Meeting our goal of getting out a MVP!

What we learned

How to stay awake. Also, dug deeper into the features of the Rails framework.

What's next for BookIT

Stripe (or some other payment system) integration, credit/karma system, and investigating ways we can make the peer-to-peer interaction a safer experience (e.g. suggesting public meet-up locations for transactions/exchange).

Share this project:

Updates