Inspiration
For freshmen in college, it is not only intimidating, but more challenging to gain access to events that upperclassmen plan. Our application will not only allow them to quickly know when the times for their favorite events are, eliminating hassles from club leaders in trying to get the message out about their club, but it also facilitates in allowing freshmen meet upperclassmen much more easily, which is vital in helping the freshmen prosper (upperclassmen can and do become great mentors for struggling freshmen, as they have experienced firsthand the same problems that freshmen face.) In a way, this app will provide a network without having to reach out to mentors personally.
What It Does
Our idea is to create an application that complies all the events of a college’s club into a calendar. We would take the idea a step further by then creating pop-up screens for each event with information on where, how expensive and if there will be refreshments served.
How We Built It
The application will first start with a welcome screen with drop down menus for the college, club name and month of the events. Once selected and once the user hits submit, the webpage would then be redirected to another page containing the calendar. We planned on making the calendar from HTML and CSS. On each cell of the calendar, we will insert a pop-up screen that will contain more information on the event, besides the person hosting it and what time of day it will be held.
Challenges We Ran Into
Since we built a webpage to model our application idea, the biggest problem was linking the CSS to the HTML file. We also had trouble creating the calendar out of HTML and CSS and attempted many times to cut down the code (there were many components of the list for the days of the month that we just couldn’t cut down). We tackled this challenge by just putting the HTML and CSS files in the same directory so they would be able to find each other more easily. We were not skilled in Javascript so we did not know how to use if statements to manipulate the drop down menus into displaying items that were characteristic to the appropriately chosen school. Another problem we ran into was the problem of the options for “What clubs/associations?” being displayed, even though we did not click on the drop down menu to open.
Accomplishments
We were able to create a dynamic welcome page that scrolls down to more options and is then connected to another calendar page. In the end, we did create a calendar out of just HTML and CSS and we were able to link the correct CSS file to an HTML file. We were also able to fix the malfunctioning dropdown menu problem by taking out the links on the html document. Since we are still on the same HTML page, it was not necessary to insert links of the same page, with just a number difference or # difference. This did solve the problem and the organizations popped up as a list once clicked on.
What I Learned
It really is better to brainstorm before coming to the venue. Initially thinking that the concepts were out of our leagues, we didn’t really take time to pick a topic we were passionate in beforehand. Having thought of this idea as freshmen that find it hard to navigate the events on campus, we really could have furthered the idea if we started earlier. We also learned that having knowledge of Javascript would have been a huge booster in our ideas of only showing certain options if a certain college is chosen. It would also have been helpful in the pop-up windows that we wanted to make on our calendar dates.
What’s Next for Test
We definitely need to finish coding the calendar and make it have dynamic functions, such as pop-up windows with more information or even have information to begin with. We would also like to attempt Javascript when we are more comfortable programming in different languages. Perhaps we could even loop into syncing this app idea to a student’s email or student portal in college (which would aid them in figuring out a schedule for not only leisure events but also academic ones).
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