Classmate!

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  Our mascot

Inspiration

We were inspired by our team member Boris who believed that group messaging in classes should be more accessible, easier, and user-friendly.

What it does

This app provides a new perspective on messaging apps. Similar to groupme, it allows simple and easy group messaging; however, Classmate is built specifically for classes and for students to interact within classes. Students register with their school emails on the app and join class messaging groups based on they are classes they are taking. This provides a mechanism for everyone in the class to communicate outside the classroom rather than just a select group of people in the class forming a groupme. We believe that everyone should have the resources available to talk, interact, and ask for assistance from their classmates and this app provides the mechanisms to do so.

How I built it

The backend is built using the django rest framework. It provides a RESTful API for adding classes, getting class information, posting messages, etc. and is also connected to a postgresql database which we used to store the user, class, school, and message data. We focused on ios since we feel that it has the greatest market potential, especially for college students. We built the app using Xcode IDE which implements swift. We focused on a clean, intuitive, and friendly design that enables users to get the most out of their group messaging experience and we believe that we truly have provided such an interface.

Challenges I ran into

The main challenge was integrating swift with django as it required detailed descriptions of how the http requests and responses should be formatted so that data proliferation could be optimized to the fullest. Luckily we wrote many tests for the backend as we believe in test driven development so the development process was pretty fluid.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We feel that we built an app that has the potential to do a lot of good and we hope to continue to work on it and possibly market it to universities so people can take advantage of its rich functionality.

What I learned

We learned the importance of communication, teamwork, and iterative development in an agile setting. Especially, with time limited, we were able to clearly express our thoughts and planned directions for this app, and because of that we were able to succeed in building it.

What's next for Classmate

We do not know what the future holds, but we hope to continue working on it and see where it takes us.

Built With

• django
• django-rest
• postgresql
• swift
• xcode