Inspiration
Planning college visits can be quite a pain. Usually, you have to go to multiple websites to find hotels, restaurants, weather for the event, and orientation hours. We decided to create an app that puts all of this together in one streamlined website.
What it does
A user can select the college they wish to visit, and then they will see a google map for directions, weather for the day in that area, ranked hotels and restaurants near the college, and orientation hours and times.
How we built it
Since there was no API that has all of this data in one set, we decided to create our own. The API gathers data through web scraping, and we showcased the API with a sample web app. In addition, we backup all the data using MongoDB to ensure all the data is constantly updated without any problems.
Challenges we ran into
Since we had to create our own API, it took a long time to collect data, so we were only able to scale it to 8 colleges. Additionally, many of the websites had security issues that prevented us from using bots to data mine from their websites.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Finishing a clean application that is scalable with a usable API.
What we learned
We learned how to create an API, use MongoDB for the first time, and bringing front end and back end programming together.
What's next for Collegevago
We'd need to scale this app for as many colleges in the US for users to plan visits and find their dream college.
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