Chope@NUS

It's crazy how there's a different process for booking different kinds of facilities at NUS. That is why we have developed Chope@NUS, a one-stop platform (bot) for all NUS facility booking needs

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Inspiration

It is extremely troublesome for students / staff of NUS to book facilities as there are many different portals to do so for different faculties. For example, a student who wants to play squash, arrange for a group project meeting and then study for an exam with his or her peers would need to use REBOOKS for sports facilities at NUS, Libportal for library discussion room bookings, Utown's facility bookings platform or their faculty's own platform to book a learning pod.

TROUBLESOME, ISN'T IT?

This is where Chope@NUS would come in handy! We decided to make a telegram bot that streamlines the booking process for you by redirecting users to the respective platforms to make their desired bookings.

On top of that, Chope@NUS also gives the most popular time slots booked for venues that have been booked so students and staff can plan their day well. 

def useChopeNUS():
        print("HELLA CONVENIENT")

What it does

Firstly, Chope@NUS streamlines the booking process by redirecting it's users to the correct platform for the facility they are interested to book.

Secondly, it gives it's users useful insights on various locations and facilites. For example, they can get the top 3 most popular time slots for a certain facility with just a few clicks.

How we built it

Firstly, we came up with a workflow that would keep the user engaged and provide them with the necessary information.

Secondly, to get the details of the respective facilities, we scrapped through the platforms provided by NUS using R

To develop the product, we made use of Telegraph API (a wrapper package for the native telegram API in javascript).

We also made use of postrgresql to acquire data of the respective faculties and the location's information. To make the bot live, we deployed it onto heroku.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was to actually gather data for the facilities since NUSIT did not provide us with a solution to get booking data for facilities. Hence, we decided to make our own mini database consisting of "chop-ers", "locations" and "bookings". We then added data into the database and used it to display some of the location information on Chope@NUS.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. We are proud of coming up with an idea that is actually a need and of our tenacities to face the challenges that we faced along the way.
  2. We are proud of coding out a telegram bot for the first time and that too in less than 24 hours!

What we learned

We learnt that our initial ideas may not be feasible and we have to make minor tweaks and adapt in order to execute an idea. We also learnt how to familiarise ourselves with new technologies in a relatively short amount of time.

What's next for Chope@NUS

  1. We plan to partner up with NUSIT so that we can get access to live booking data of facilities at NUS.
  2. We plan to add GPS locations to find facilites.
  3. We plan to add a feature that provides booking statistics for individual users.
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