College App^2

Logo(College App^2)

Inspiration

Both of us have older siblings who went through the college application process. This gave us some insight into how the process was stressful, overwhelming, and a lot to keep track of at times! As current highschoolers, we wanted to create a hack that could help our peers and us in the future!

What it does

We created a Discord bot using the discord.py library that can assist students in the college application and pre-application time periods. Some features of our bot include:

/add: Adds a new college application task to your list of applications; Sends you reminders regarding your Applications at 50%, 75%, and 100% time marks.
/remove: Removes a college application from your list of applications
/timeline: Displays your list of applications
/positive: Sends a pun to the user because college applications can oftentimes be very stressful!
/sat: Sends an SAT-level word and math problem (with a hidden answer) for the user to practice with
/about: Provides information about the college in addition to touring information (virtual and in-person). We also link the user to the appropriate page of College Board’s website for further information regarding tuition, average scores, graduation rates, and more.

We also created a website prototype that illustrates these features outside of Discord.

How we built it

We programmed the Discord Bot on Repl.it using the discord.py library and datetime module. The website prototype was built on Google Sites.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge we ran into was with the Repl.it servers. When the load on Repl was too high, our bot was not able to run. We were able to continue testing using the console and then integrate once Repl.it was up and running for us again! To fix this problem in the future, we plan on moving to another IDE such as Pycharm.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We both learned a lot about the discord library in Python. We have both used it in the past, but we were able to try more advanced features such as incorporating embeds and waiting for a set amount of time.

What we learned

In addition to the discord library in Python, we learned how to manage our time for a project with a short timeframe!

What's next for College App^2

With 36 hours, we are happy with the number of features we were able to incorporate. We really enjoyed the brainstorming process for this hack and want to build upon this hack further! Our goal for College App^2 is for it to become a one-stop shop for highschoolers!

Incorporating website scraping (by utilizing libraries such as Scrappy and BeautifulSoup) to display data from the CollegeBoard website within our bot or website, as opposed to how it is currently links to an external site. We would display data such as the college’s graduation rates, transfer rates, offered majors, athletics, clubs/organizations, and more!
Recommending if a college is an academic, financial, or social fit for a student. We would do this by making use of the website scraping from the point above in addition to some preliminary questions to the user.
Expanding the reminder service to text messages or emails.

College App^2: Making the college application process exponentially easier!