Carousel

Inspiration

Our team drew inspiration from the fact that many professors and TA's try to organize study groups for their classes, but they are rarely effective. We thought a student-centered, web-app approach to this concept would create more opportunities for students to find and stick with study groups. Also, we noticed the highly competitive academic culture here at Georgia Tech, and believed that this application would thrive.

What it does

Carousel allows users (students) to create an account and specify the courses they are taking. Then, it allows the user to search for a random study group based on course, date, and time, in which the user will be placed with other anonymous students. Carousel provides a study location, and from there, the rest is history.

How we built it

We designed Carousel as a web-application, with python powering the back-end functionality and HTML, CSS, and javascript on the front-end. We delegated tasks throughout the project, switching roles back and forth between front-end/back-end developer, researcher, etc.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into challenges while fetching data from input fields contained in the User Interface, and sending this data to the back-end side of the server. The data types were often complex, such as dates or times, and this accounted for plenty of challenges, especially while converting data between two separate languages.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of a very nice and aesthetically pleasing User Interface, along with the fact that we developed a mostly functioning program in just 36 hours.

What we learned

We learned that a lot more goes into creating a web application from scratch than one would think, and unexpected challenges can present themselves which prove to be the hardest throughout the entire project.

What's next for Carousel

We plan to offer functionality for other categories, not just studying, such as pick-up sports or other recreational activities. Also, we plan to perfect our User Interface, continually test for bugs, and add more features relating to a user's account options and personalization.