LA' CUNY-compass

Inspiration

A major reason for low awareness about CUNY resources is the hard to find information, spread across over 30+ webpages for CUNY and about 100+ pages for all specific CUNY colleges. We thought of a way to aggregate all resources and provide them directly to all CUNY students through power of OpenAI Artificial Intelligence model which comes pretrained on CUNY data.

What it does

To give each student their personalized resources according to their needs, we have a questionnaire that allows OpenAI 4o-mini model to create specific resources based on multiple metrics allowing students to easily extract information about Essential resources they need and their physical availability through a map.

How we built it

Built using OpenAI 4o-mini model for chatbot, Flask for Backend, React Tailwind for Frontend, Leaflet.js for Maps functionality.

Challenges we ran into

None of us had worked with OpenAI model before so following the API documentation and integrating it with rest of app was a bit of challenge. We had limited experience working with Flask so Integrating the OpenAI model and interacting with Frontend was a huge challenge but we ultimately figured it out by Peer Debugging.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to get everything integrated in the website delivering a effective MVP for this hackathon. We were able to also implement almost every functionality that we had initially planned and designed in Figma Mockups.

What we learned

OpenAI api, Working with Flask and integrating different moving pieces in website development. Software Development lifecycle involving creating Figma mockup for our website, Jira story mapping and tickets to manage/delegate tasks effectively working in our team. Utilizing Github branches, Pull Request Reviews and overall control of versioning.

What's next for CUNY

Due to limited time, we weren't able to make a Signup prompt in Questionnaire for our Newsletter to let student keep in touch with new/current resources available to them. The Map's functionality will also need improvement where we plan to integrate Map with ChatBots response so students can physically see the resources available near them. Another very important future step is Containerizing the development environment for smooth future development experience and also easily deploy it.