Club Circle

Discover, Connect, Collaborate. We recommend clubs based on your interests, filtering out the noise. Get started in seconds and see where the magic takes you.

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The Problem

Students are often intimidated when attempting to discover new clubs and activities. Penn State’s present resources, Orgcentral and the Engagement app, overwhelm students with massive lists of clubs and lack a robust way for students to receive personalized recommendations. The desired outcome of implementing our novel recommendation engine, ClubCircle, is to make a variety of engagement suggestions based on a student’s interests. This will make the club selection process faster and less daunting for new students.

The Solution

We assume that people will become involved more readily and more easily if they receive suggestions for clubs which are relevant to their interests and abilities. Our simple, easy-to-use web tool allows a potentially daunting list of clubs to be rapidly reduced to a manageable set of user-focused recommendations. A user simply inputs their interests and academic focus, and our system curates a list of relevant clubs for them.

Our Technology

For our backend, we used a Flask server, hosted on Replit for rapid prototyping and ease of use. We linked this system to a Bootstrap frontend created in Bootstrap Studio, which makes API calls to the Flask server with the user’s preferences. We selected these tools because of their performance and ease of use in a time-constrained scenario. The final product is a website which takes user input, makes API calls, and returns, formats, and presents data.

Challenges and Solutions

Halfway through our development process, a team member had to leave unexpectedly. This left us with a difficult choice: we could either abandon the project, or press on with limited resources. Determined not to give up, we took the latter route. Responding to this setback, we deployed an AI system with a custom API to more efficiently build a product without reliance on hard-coded datasets.

Accessibility

We made sure to meet standard accessibility guidelines for our website. Our product does not rely on complex graphical interfaces. We use a clean and streamlined approach which presents information in a clear and straightforward manner, ensuring that the most users possible can benefit from our system.

Operationalization

To move our system into an operational posture, we would be interested in scanning and categorizing existing lists of clubs. This would enable us to better serve the user with more accurate results, but would require extensive sorting and tagging: we would aim to accomplish this with machine learning and smart sorting techniques.

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