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Collab Civic Hackathon 2020
Project Prototype
Description
Why Collab started (motivation):
Consider you are a Mechanical Engineering student, and you want to work on an idea/project (e.g. car) that requires some technical knowledge of other Engineering disciplines too. Now you want to make a team consisting of students from different departments. How will you do that? Will you contact the academic cell of those departments to circulate an email there and probably wait for days before getting a satisfactory reply? Or will you ask your limited number of friends, in real life or on social media, from the required department? What if they are not interested and you do not have a large social circle? Or will you pin an announcement paper on the notice board of those departments which no one will ever see? You would just not do that because it is too hectic, and you will most likely lose your interest in your idea by then. What if there is a solution to all this?
How it started:
It started when we were working on one of our projects. It took us lots of time to find suitable members for our team and then after the progress of a month, we found out that someone else from another university had already worked on a similar project in his FYP. So, actually, we just re-did what he had done already, essentially resulting in zero progress. This can be called re-inventing the wheel.
This made us realize about how this void in communication and collaboration results in a lot of projects with great potential, getting dumped or go unrecognized because they get isolated and no one further works upon them, instead everyone starts their projects from scratch again…
What’s Collab:
Collab is an online data repository for making collaboration among students of different disciplines and universities, easy and convenient. This would make the real learning happen by fostering innovation in projects done by individuals of various backgrounds, but similar capabilities to work with.
Plan of Action:
Establish an online platform with an articulate database in the back-end, maintaining a systematic arrangement of projects, start-ups and other initiatives by the students. Not only this, but it would also include their stories, motivation and challenges to help others to work upon or collaborate on these existing projects. This would form a state-of-the-art ecosystem for students, industry, and academia to work on problems together.
This database will be populated by the student submissions. Collab may also serve as a submission portal for the projects while establishing a database side by side.
How it's different:
You might be thinking that many solutions exist out there for this problem like using platforms like Google scholars, ResearchGate, Github or LinkedIn etc. Why not use these platform to find people to collaborate with? The key catch here is that our platform operates at the grass-root level. Majority of projects or FYPs done in university don't get published on media, hence they stay in shadows for their lifetime. On ResearchGate you might find someone from Bangladesh sharing your idea but would you collaborate with someone 2000km away? Of course you would want someone from your university, from the school next to you. That's where Collab comes in. It is made for students in universities of Pakistan and made by the students. It would specifically, categorically and securely keep a repository for you to test and analyze your ideas anytime you want.
Collab Video
This NOT the demo video. Watch this to understand our motivation and philosophy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4ju8QMvOlc
Challenges Faced
Since almost all of our team was from Mechanical Engineering, it was quite challenging to learn and implement new things as our academics continued. But surely this project opened new paradigms in front of us and we learned completely new things and realized how important it is to have knowledge of programming, even if you are from another discipline. Following bullets summarize some key challenging points:
- Getting started with Django Authentication and Forms System
- Learning different Django development methods
- Creating a Responsive User Interface for both desktop and mobile devices
- Developing working prototype in less than 5 days with lots of pending Assignments and Quizzes
- Creating a well-designed UI.
Accomplishments:
We are proud of being able to make it through the process of pitching our idea and being supported by our colleagues in our university. The process deliverables have been recorded, and we are amazed by the organizational skills and professionalism. One of the significant successes was being able to find a Faculty advisor who not only monitored our progress but also guided us throughout the challenges we faced. Then finally, we made a prototype, tested it, and accomplished the tasks related to Collab, website designing, and project database formatting. We maintained a good team to handle work and held frequent meetings/calls to coordinate and discuss all available resources.
What's next:
We aim to make Collab an official project database as well as a social media type platform. It would have distinct portals for each university of Pakistan and a central database which may be used by the universities as, or in addition to, their learning management system. The submission and evaluation of the semester projects and FYPs will occur on this platform in an organized way. From the teacher’s perspective, it would replace the manual collection and download of the project material of each student through emails, and then making and managing its database. This whole manual process will be automated and access to this organized database for every project/FYP would be possible by just a few clicks. The necessary data will be accessible to all students under certain SOPs and the students could also contact the team of those executed projects for guidance. There will be a portal where students would pitch their idea of a project to recruit interested members from other departments to work in collaboration.
Technologies Used
- Django
- Bootstrap 4 (Material Design)
Team Collab
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