Inspiration
Our group consists of three second year university students and one first year. All of us are doing online school right now and have been finding it hard to maintain the same level of connection or even start to connect with fellow university students. Moving from high school to university and not being able to meet peers to learn from and connect with is hard. As a result, we thought that an effective way to encourage people to connect with their peers was to create ConnectU: a website where any university student can go to find another student at the same university with a similar personality type and be study buddies with. With a simple process but effective matching, we believe that ConnectU could be a useful tool to improve the lives of many university students during this time.
What it does
The website leads the user to a Google Form, which takes data and stores it in Google Sheets. The Gale-Shapley algorithm then collects the data from Sheets and matches the students into pairs.
How I built it
We used React and Material design to build the frontend of the project. The Gale-Shapley algorithm was developed using Python and the website is hosted on Netlify with a custom domain from Domain.com.
Challenges I ran into
For three of us, it was our first time at a hackathon, so it was a challenge to come up with a feasible project for the hackathon and get into the flow of creating (because of some software issues and idea edits). Aryan had been to some before so he was able to provide insight into some things to do or avoid.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We are proud that we were able to work together well and finish our project by harnessing each other's strengths.
What I learned
We learned a lot about coming up with good hackathon project ideas and how to make the most out of a hackathon for next time. We were also able to learn from each other because of our varying skills.
What's next for ConnectU
We believe that the check-in system would be a valuable feature to add into ConnectU. By checking in often and reflecting on their personal connections, we believe that students would be more likely to take the time and effort to maintain healthy relationships with peers.
TEAM MEMBERS: Aryan Patel, Shirley Yu, Nivetha Sathish, Hannah Zhang.
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