College Launch

Inspiration

We found our inspiration at the intersection of two themes: Education and Inequality. Given this harsh political climate and significant opportunity gap, we wanted to create a project that would fight inequality in higher education. We hope that our application is able to help low-income students find the resources they need to make their college dreams a reality. While looking into existing resources that fulfill that goal, we found some opportunities for top students, but there is almost nothing available for all low-income students that would accomplish the level of resource availability that our app provides.

What it does

This app provides a number of accessible resources and steps that students can take in order to prepare themselves for the college admissions process. It provides information about relevant colleges (only around Durham, NC for now, but will expand to many, many more), college admission related events in the area, programs that are specifically tailored towards underprivileged students, advice about the application process, and information about applying for financial aid. Eventually, the app will be able to store individual users' information in order to provide a more friendly user experience.

How we built it

We built this app using the help of App Lab on Code.org and using its UI Tool Kit as a springboard for our app's development. We then used primarily Javascript to code the elements, functions and interface of the app. Our data was completely collected from our analysis of various college statistics and websites.

Challenges we ran into

It was at first challenging to come up with a project that was both useful and feasible, given the time limit, so we spent a significant amount of time brainstorming. Additionally, we found it difficult to find a way to easily create our app and yet have all the functionality that we wanted; indeed, we ran into some limitations with the UI kit that we were using, since it is fairly restrictive in the functions that it will support and the amount of freedom we have in the design.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of our app's mission and believe that it carries it out in a manner that both looks and feels great. It is an incredibly easy app to navigate, and it also looks professional and sleek. Additionally, we are proud of the way that the user can choose which of the colleges are their favorites, and those colleges appear on their list of favorite colleges for easy reference.

What we learned

We learned a ton throughout this process, not only about the opportunities that are available for students of low income when they are preparing for college, but just how difficult it is to obtain all of that information in one place. Many resources exist, but none have the comprehensive scope that our app will once it has more data. From a coding perspective, we learned a significant amount about coding and formatting apps.

What's next for College Launch

Our next steps are to format the application in a way that it can be uploaded to the App Store or Google Play. Additionally, we will be adding more colleges, events, and helper programs to our app's database and giving users suggestions based on their location, financial status, GPA, and other factors. Eventually, we hope to be the go-to resource for students as they are beginning their college searches.