CITeams

CITeams Logo

Inspiration

MCIT students, especially MCIT online students often face challenges of finding group members for course projects or simply study mates, especially during Covid-19 when students have to study remotely and do not have much interaction in person.

What it does

CITeams is a convenient Slack App that helps MCIT students find course project team members and study mates. This Slack App makes the teammate matching process easier. In terms of some core features, a user can create, delete, and edit posts of recruitment for teammates or study mates. A user and the relevant users (current teammates) will be added to a channel created by the slack APP once the post is published. A user can see all public recruitment posts and choose to enter the channel that fits their need.

How we built it

We developed the Slack app using Bolt framework for Javascript, which supports rendering views, user interactions, and creating and joining channels. We use MongoDB as the database to store user information and post information. Finally, we use Heroku to deploy the application.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of initializing this great idea of assisting students in forming groups for class projects. With this app, we can get rid of the traditional way of forming groups by posting on Piazza, which doesn’t support direct message, or messaging to only the people that you already know. From technical perspective, we are proud of successfully establish this slack app which is based on our understanding of how plug-ins work and interact with existing big platforms. We are also proud of us finding a way to testing the code locally using socket mode because there is a very limited internet resources on socket mode. We still managed to create an app with socket mode.

What we learned

From this hackathon, we know that we need to cooperate with each other and communicate with each other. Every member in our teams has important roles, for example, Seren is our product manager, she helped us figure out the main functions of our product, Yihong and Wentao are responsible for front end user interaction implementation. Ruifan and Ruichen are responsible for back end and database buildup. We keep communicating with each other and keep updating everyday. We also learned that the implementation of a big project takes lots of effort and time. Not only do we need excellent ideas, but also we need to figure out every detail.

What's next for CITeams

First of all, the app will try to satisfy more application scenarios such as matching mock interview partners and food/bar mates, etc. Additionally, we would like to explore more features on the message tab. For example, slash command arguments can be used to view posts. Furthermore, the app will allow users to filter the public post board according to some keywords that are of their own interest. Finally, the app is now only deployed in MCIT on-campus workspace. We would also like to deploy it in other workspaces such as MCIT online workspace. MCIT Online students have limited exposure to interaction with other students and thus are in stronger need of finding partners for course projects.