Clustr

Find, host, and reserve study spaces effortlessly

Comment

Inspiration

Personal life experiences and complaints from friends. The lack of a good website for group study and the lack of an easy tool to check for open rooms in library motivated us to work on this project.

What it does

Clustr is a website which allows students to group together for study sessions and find open spots in library to study in. Users have an option to either host a group or join a group. Hosts enter the details of the group study, the subject of interest, the time of the group meet, the location of the group meet and the number of people in the group. These inputs are then used by a web scraper to find open rooms in library which the host can book for the group study session at their chosen campus location. Users then have an option to join such groups aligned with their subject interests and join the group study session at the chosen location.

How we built it

We used Firebase for our main back-end operations such as database, and authentication. We used react for the back and front end, tying together a smooth back-to-front experience. We used python along with selenium to create a web scraper which finds open rooms in libraries of the chosen campus locations for the group to study in. We designed the database to work with the web scraper directly for low latency and fast responses.

Challenges we ran into

It was tough to come up with the web scrapper and learn the necessary libraries to build it. A big challenge in building the web scraper was the way data was presented on the Rutgers Library website. We had to do a lot of thinking and optimizing to get the data in the form we needed. Another challenge was integrating many of our front-end components with the database. We also planned to include a few more features like having a chatroom, having a filter for subject of interests, having the ability of manage the group. We had to cut these features out of the final project due to lack to time and complications in the code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

In the end, what we were truly proud of was the fact through every hardship we endured, we somehow managed to find a way through it and in the end, all that hair-pulling and stress-biting was worth it for the experience and project we created. We created this project in 24 hours with all these features and abilities which consumed a lot of our intellectual, physical, emotional capacity. We spent the entire 24 hours with barely any sleep to make this project a reality and we were able to finally do it.

What we learned

We learned more about Full-Stack Development, proper team collaboration, database creation and integration, and building a new tool called a web scraper. We learned to combine all of our knowledge to create something amazing which helps a lot of students in schools and universities to get together and study therefore promoting socialization and fostering friendships.

What's next for Clustr

We hope to reach a wider audience, and also expand to not only study groups but other communal, congregational activites

Share this project:

Updates