PEM(Penn State Event Map)

Home page (Find Events Near Me page)
Add An Event page

Inspiration

Our team members experienced hardships being involved with the Penn State community as we joined college during the height of Covid. We wanted to create an application that would allow future generations seamless interaction between peers so they don't face the difficulties we had to.

What it does

Our project allows the user to view and create events and post them for everyone to see. They are able to visually see the location of a Google map and a list of events shows up on the side. If the person does not have a login for the site, they can register at anytime. Also we added a report feature, so if people find an event that is too vulgar and think that it should be taken down from the site, they can hit the report button and send a message to all the admins (Our team members).

How we built it

We used the python Django framework to develop the website and all the backend functions. We also used a Microsoft Sql Server to store all of our important information.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest Challenge we faced was the loading speed of our Map with the list of events. We used geopy, a python library for getting the longitude and latitude coordinates of a place, but it came with its drawbacks. This service limited the usage of its library, so we would often wait long times or have crashes when working with large datasets. We wanted to implement a caching system so that we wouldn't have to run calculations for the locations every time the page was loaded, but unfortunately, we were unable to accomplish this before the time limit.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of getting our google maps map api to work the way that it did. We were able to mark the location of each of our registered events as well as have a little title on hover appear for each of them. We are also proud of getting the creation of the events to work.

What we learned

There was a lot of learning done in this project. Many of us had little to no experience working with Django, so we spent a lot of time learning the mechanics of how the Django System worked. There was also a slight curve in learning how to operate the database through python. ## What's next for PEM As per mentioned, we want to implement a caching system as we believe that it will drastically reduce the loading times of our website. We also want to add more functionality. Right now we can view and create events, but we want to be able to update and delete them as well. Also, we want to eventually launch this as a fully developed website so that others can finally get the opportunity in an effortless way.