Club applications - especially at schools like Cal - have become more and more competitive in recent years. Students must keep track of numerous deadlines, attend many introductory events, submit application materials, and constantly stress to find clubs that best fit their future career goals amongst a huge student body.
ClubScout centralizes and simplifies the club application season for both students and clubs. From a student point of view, ClubScout helps efficiently apply to clubs by centralizing all application questions and important dates. It also allows students to discover new clubs based on their interests and majors by using keyword searches. From a club point of view, ClubScout allows club officers to post information and review applications in a more organized system than stray Google Forms.
After lots of brainstorming and research, we decided to work simultaneously on frontend and backend. We started designing the user interface using Figma, making sure the platform would be accessible to everyone. Based on our UI/UX design concept, we created two databases: one to store student user information and another for club information. Finally, we completed the Swift code for our app in Xcode based on our UI/UX design. Our team also worked on coding features beyond Figma's capabilities, such as searching through lists and user input.
Because none of our team had any experience with app development or building and accessing databases prior to CalHacks, a majority of our time was spent figuring out how to bring our ideas to life. Over the past twenty-four hours, we have watched endless YouTube videos, read multiple online tutorials, and slept a collective five hours in an attempt to code ClubScouts using Swift and Figma, neither of which we had seen before.
We have two goals for ClubScouts’ future. One: utilize information in the database to personalize the app experience for users and clubs. For example, students will eventually be able to add clubs to their "Applying To" list and add these deadlines to their calendar. Two: work on Google Authentication and Firebase. Students will be able to manage their accounts using their school emails and IDs. After all, ClubScouts was made for students by students.
We still have a long way to go in designing and testing ClubScouts, but we're proud of the progress we made during CalHacks. Our team came into CalHacks unfamiliar with mobile app design, but we'll leave more confidence in our ability to code and our ability to innovate.
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