CampusConnect

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  Group of People surrounding a university building

Inspiration

As a Penn State student, keeping up with campus events is a challenge! Clubs rely on social media like GroupMe and Instagram, which can easily flood your feed, leading to missed opportunities. We've all had that moment of discovering an amazing event—only to realize it already happened. That’s why we created CampusConnect—a seamless way to keep student life organized beyond the classroom.

What it does

CampusConnect consolidates all local clubs and events in State College into one easy-to-navigate platform. Users can browse events, add them to their dashboard, and categorize them for a personalized experience. The app integrates with calendars, allowing users to track their interests effortlessly. Plus, with a built-in chatbot, users can ask about upcoming events—like the next basketball game—and instantly add them to their schedule.

How we built it

We built a sleek, professional-looking front end! For many of us, this was our first hackathon or our first real programming project. Yet, we crafted an intuitive UI that makes it easy for users to explore and organize events.

Challenges we ran into

One of the major challenges was back-end development. With little experience in this area, we spent hours learning Selenium for web scraping but eventually pivoted to SeatGeek’s API for event data. When integration proved difficult, we created placeholder events for future API implementation. Despite the challenges, we embraced the learning curve and gained valuable insights into back-end development and APIs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built a sleek, professional-looking front end! For many of us, this was our first hackathon or our first real programming project. Yet, we crafted an intuitive UI that makes it easy for users to explore and organize events.

What we learned

Diving into back-end development was a major learning experience for us. We started with little to no knowledge in this area, but throughout this hackathon, we gained a solid understanding of APIs, web scraping, database management, and server-side logic. Learning Selenium for web scraping introduced us to automation, while working with SeatGeek’s API taught us how to fetch and integrate external data into our platform. We also explored authentication, data structuring, and the challenges of handling dynamic content.

Beyond technical skills, we learned the importance of adaptability—when something didn’t work, we quickly pivoted and found new solutions. Collaboration was also key, as we divided tasks, helped each other debug, and kept pushing forward despite roadblocks. This experience gave us a strong foundation in back-end development and boosted our confidence to tackle even bigger projects in the future!

What's next for CampusConnect

We're doubling down on back-end development to enhance functionality and integrating a smart chatbot for a more interactive experience. Stay tuned—CampusConnect is just getting started!

Built With

• react
• replit
• seatgeek
• typescript