ClubHub

ClubHub connects you to clubs and their events, so students can conveniently find things they are interested in doing

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Inspiration

Imagine you are a freshman in high school or college. As you begin your journey into a new, unfamiliar place, you come to a world that contains many new opportunities for learning and connecting with people who have common interests via academic and social clubs. For example, you could be interested in Math, but cannot find the community that helps nurture your skill. You could be interested in English but not have the resources to practice your writing with other people. Even though your school offers a club rush event, you could be sick or have prior engagements at that time and not be able to attend. After this club rush, it is hard to find out information about a club, what they do, and when they meet, because the club will not be able to contact you unless you provide contact information to them at club rush.

Additionally, when students join several different clubs, it is easy for them to forget about meetings. Although clubs may email out reminders about general meetings and events, these emails are often marked as spam, or students unsubscribe from them or ignore them due to large volume of emails they receive every day. Hence, ClubHub will come to the rescue by updating you about every future event from every club from your school that you are interested in. You do not have to attend club rush in order to get any information. You do not have to join any club in order to get notification of any event or competition. ClubHub will save you tons of time with a simple click and swipe. We also provide a detailed calendar that merges with your own calendar in order to help you avoid time conflicts. And perhaps the biggest benefit of all, do you like free food? then ClubHub will be your best friend! since it has information of every free food event in its detailed club database. You can just simply filter the events for the free food section and will find many events with free food.

We believe that this app can be useful to every high school and university student, which inspired us to work hard and get the fundamental parts finished. We plan to expand the functionality after the hackathon, with the hope that it can reach everyone in all parts of the world.

What it does

ClubHub provides a list of events from every club from one specific campus. The clubs post their events via the web application, which will automatically generate a calendar that helps students see all of their upcoming events in a user-friendly overview. The web application takes input from a MongoDB database, showing a user all of the upcoming events for the clubs that they are affiliated with. These events include a description of what will happen, the time and location of the event, and any other relevant information such as FREE FOOD. Also, the user can use the calendar service to manage their time and prepare for their event. Using the SendGrid API, users can receive confirmation emails about their upcoming events as well.

How we built it

We used HTML/CSS for the primary website design, angularJS and JQuery for responsive design (Calendar and event lists), MongoDB, Mongoose, Expressjs and node.js for server-side data hosting.

Challenges we ran into

At the beginning, we had trouble integrating web APIs from the backend into the frontend. Originally, our plan was to create an Android app, but we ran into API integration issues and decided to move to a web app due to time constraints, as integrating from node.js to a web app was quicker to deploy. Although the team was made up of members with different skill levels and experience, we tried our best to catch up and help each other learn.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Finishing the project! Integrating APIs, making a fully functional website, and learning a lot about both back- and front-end development. We learned how to bounce back when we felt frustrated. We learned how to use quick self-learning technology (YouTube tutorials, stackoverflow LOL) and how to google properly. We are proud of being able to work and collaborate together with a team and find the solutions for a specific, solvable real world problem.

What we learned

Responsive design, using HTTP to parse information from a database, AngularJS for single-page loading

What's next for ClubHub

We plan to add functionality for club officers to add information about their clubs and upcoming events, possibly through a Google Form, as well as making general improvements to the UI/UX. We also want to improve the upload form process by implementing Google Cloud Text Detection. The user just simply takes the picture of their event lists and the app will automatically populate all information fields. Moreover, we want to introduce the app to our schools so they can introduce it to the next freshman generation during orientation. With this app, everyone has the ability to be up-to-date and mindful of what is going on around their campus. What we hope is that after every orientation, freshmen can feel comfortable and enjoy their learning environment more. They know when and where to go to the place/club/event that can help them surpass their limitation and fulfill their academic journey. Making connections is the ultimate goal for ClubHub.

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