Bookly

Inspiration

We found that falling literacy paves the road for foundational gaps in later education and careers. By building an app that combats this, we hope to find learners of any age enjoying reading and discovering new books.

What it does

The app allows users to find the book(s) they’re reading, log the pages they’ve read, and find highly customized book recommendations to keep users engaged in their learning. The components motivating continued reading involve a daily streak counter, groups that users can create or join using an invite code, and a live leaderboard to compete with their peers, earning more points by reading more pages.

How we built it

We first arrived at a consensus on what the application’s core components should be and then drafted a specification sheet from there. We then turned the specification sheet into a series of phases that could be completed and put together. Afterwards, we tested our application many times to uncover any bugs or issues with our implementations, fixing them in the process.

Challenges we ran into

A large challenge we faced towards the beginning of the project was coming to a consensus on the core components of the application that would effectively address the problem at hand. We had many back and forth discussions before arriving at a final decision and beginning to draft the specifications. Later on, the challenges we ran into were learning how to use new softwares that we had previously no experience with, such as Supabase, but with a little bit of Googling and practice, we were able to overcome that as well.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have come up with an idea that tackles such a fundamental issue in many learners lives. From learners in elementary schools to universities, Bookly challenges users to engage in difficult tasks with a self-regulated motivation machine.

What we learned

We learned that problem solving and teamwork can look quite different from person to person and that leveraging each team member’s strengths and weaknesses can make for efficient project progress. We discovered how to maximize our resources and improve our overall efficiency, while simultaneously discovering how front-ends, back-ends, external websites, and API-keys all talk to each other and keep the application functioning.

What's next for Bookly

We’re hoping to continue improving the app’s overall functionality and add more features that learners could find helpful. We’d like to gain traction on this app by promoting it at educational institutions and to anyone interested in improving their own literacy. We hope that this will bring positive change to the educational crisis the world currently faces.

Built With

• googlebooksapi
• html
• next.js
• postgresql
• supabase
• typescript
• vercel