Inspiration
As a high school student currently, I have seen a lot of classmates worry about college applications for next year because it is very difficult to figure out what exactly you need to do to be eligible to apply to the largest amount of colleges. A friend of mine recently showed me a giant spreadsheet of colleges filled out with test options and grade policies for each school, and it inspired me to pitch a site that could take that information and make it accessible to everyone.
What it does
The site should allow the user to select from an array of options (checkbox-style) on the home page detailing test and grade policies, and for which years--as of currently, the site would include class of 2021, 2022, and 2023. After clicking submit, the site should connect to an API or a Google Sheet containing the information (this might also have to be built since I don't think there is an API that has all this information--that would probably be the largest part of programming this project), retrieve information according to the criteria inputted by the user, and display a table of schools with those criteria and other options if not specified by the user (e.g. if the user asks for test-optional policies but does not specify for what classes, the table would provide that information for each school).
How we built it
This is a non-technical pitch that details what the site should do once coded, so a lot of time was spent coming up with a good idea. There's a bit of sample code included with this pitch to show a layout of what the page might look like from two HTML files, one CSS file, and one Javascript file, but it is very basic, and the final site would probably be much more high-tech.
Challenges we ran into
Originally I had intended to code this project, but my teammates were not able to compete and I was not sure if I could build something fully functional on my own. I am also pretty new to hackathons and do not have very much experience building a whole application, so I decided to try the non-technical idea, just to participate in yuHACKS and get the experience.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I'm proud that I was able to submit something to yuHACKS! It was very difficult to find motivation to continue after I decided I would not be able to submit a written program, so I'm happy it turned out okay.
What we learned
From this challenge, I have a project idea! These are pretty hard to come by, and it's awesome that I now have something that I can work on as a personal project after yuHACKS is over. Though the idea is still in its starting stages, it's a solid one that I think I can expand on in the future.
What's next for CCSearch
Building the site. Of course, there's some base code already there, but I want to add a lot more Javascript to have more functions, and I probably will need to build the API as well, since I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist yet. New challenges, yay!
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