CircleUp

A student skill-exchange platform where college students connect, learn from one another, and grow together

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CircleUp — Learn Together. Grow Together.

A student-powered skill exchange platform that turns campus connections into learning opportunities.

Inspiration

Every college has students with different strengths. One student may be good at programming, another may understand electronics, while someone else may be skilled in design, communication, or problem-solving.

But students often struggle to find the right people to learn from. They may not know who has a particular skill, whom to approach for guidance, or how to build meaningful learning connections beyond their own friend groups.

We wanted to solve this problem by creating a platform where students can discover one another's abilities, exchange knowledge, and grow together.

That idea became CircleUp.

What it does

CircleUp is a student skill-exchange platform that helps college students connect based on the skills they can teach and the skills they want to learn.

Students create profiles, list their skills, discover other students across engineering branches, and send exchange requests. Once a request is accepted, they can communicate through private messaging to coordinate their learning exchange.

Instead of relying only on traditional learning resources, CircleUp encourages students to learn directly from one another.

Key Features

1. Student Profiles

Students can create profiles with their name, engineering branch, study year, bio, and preferred learning format.

2. Skill Listings

Students can list:

  • Skills they can offer to teach.
  • Skills they want to learn.

This helps make each student's strengths and learning goals visible.

3. Discover Students

Explore other students and find people with skills that match your interests.

CircleUp is designed to bring together students from different engineering branches, encouraging interdisciplinary learning and collaboration.

4. Skill Exchange Requests

Students can send exchange requests to others, explain what they want to learn, and suggest what they can offer in return.

Recipients can accept or decline requests, while students can track their exchange status.

5. Private Messaging

After an exchange request is accepted, participants can open a private conversation and coordinate their learning sessions.

6. Exchange Management

Students can manage their requests and track their progress through statuses such as pending, accepted, declined, cancelled, and completed.

How we built it

CircleUp was developed as a web application using:

  • HTML — Structure of the application.
  • CSS — Styling and responsive interface.
  • JavaScript — Application logic and interactive features.
  • Supabase — Authentication, database, and real-time messaging functionality.
  • Vercel — Hosting and deployment.

Supabase provides the backend infrastructure for student accounts, profiles, skills, exchange requests, and messages. The application uses database access policies to help protect student data.

Challenges we ran into

Building CircleUp involved more than creating a user interface.

Some of our main challenges were:

  • Connecting frontend functionality with Supabase.
  • Setting up authentication and email confirmation.
  • Designing database relationships for profiles, skills, and exchange requests.
  • Implementing request management with appropriate status changes.
  • Setting up secure access to private conversations.
  • Making messaging work between two authenticated students.
  • Deploying the application and testing the live version.

Working through these challenges helped us understand how a full-stack web application works, from its interface to its database.

What we learned

During this project, we gained practical experience with:

  • Building interactive web applications using JavaScript.
  • Working with Supabase authentication and databases.
  • Designing database tables and relationships.
  • Implementing access policies for user data.
  • Connecting frontend components to backend services.
  • Deploying and testing a live web application.
  • Collaborating as a team to build a complete product.

What's next for CircleUp?

We see CircleUp as a platform that can grow beyond a basic skill-exchange application.

Some features we would like to explore in the future include:

  • Group-based skill exchange sessions.
  • Scheduling and availability management.
  • Student ratings and feedback after completed exchanges.
  • More advanced skill-based recommendations.
  • Learning communities for different engineering branches.
  • Progress tracking for students' learning journeys.

Impact

We believe that every student has something valuable to teach and something new to learn.

CircleUp aims to make those connections easier.

By encouraging students to exchange knowledge across branches, we hope to build a campus culture where collaboration becomes a natural part of learning.

CircleUp is built on one simple belief: You don't have to learn everything alone.

Project Links

Team

Built by a team of 3 students for CSC Winter Sparkathon.

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