Campus Carta

Connecting you to campus community!

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Inspiration

We're always looking for something to do on campus! With so many calendars and separate websites for academic, arts, culture, and sports events (and more!) and over 500+ recognized student organizations at William & Mary, we created Campus Carta for students to see what's going on around them.

What it does

  • Can zoom in and out to different locations on a map
  • Filter by events (arts & culture, free food, workshops, etc.) that suit your interests
  • See the concentration of events happening; what spaces are particularly popular?
  • Filter by dates that events are happening and the host of events

How we built it

We used Leaflet.js and React for the frontend, and express on the backend with a Firestore database for storing event information.

Challenges we ran into

We faced some challenges with our team GitHub, especially with merge conflicts since oftentimes all three of us would be working on a different part of the project and editing the same files. We also learned a lot over the course of the hackathon about webscraping, using tools like React, and synching backend to frontend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We gained a lot of new knowledge about web-scraping, Firebase, React, and using Leaflet (none of us had used it before!) We also gained familiarity with Git commands (particularly resolving merge conflicts.) We did a great job as a team communicating what we were all doing and allocating work to one another. Oh, and I had a full energy drink for the first time.

What we learned

  • How to use tools (React, Leaflet.js, Firebase, Git)
  • Which parts of the files control which aspects of the frontend
  • How to webscrape from multiple sites (campus events page, athletics, other academic postings)
  • How to resolve merge conflicts and have multiple people collaborating on the same file(s)

What's next for Campus Carta

Of course, we know that finding events around campus isn't just something William & Mary students want to do; everyone finds themselves with a free Saturday sometimes and the desire to "productively" procrastinate their work! ;) Because of this, we'd like to expand this to other universities (such as UVA!) and add events from even more webpages and maybe have a filter for academic events by major. We would also like to expand this to include events happening off-campus, such as in Colonial Williamsburg for W&M or Charlottesville for UVA.

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