Dion - College Events

Dion Logo
Browsing Events
Creating and Posting Events
Event Page

Inspiration

Our website was named after Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, fertility, and festivity. The inspiration behind creating Dion stemmed from our experience with club events, where I noticed how difficult it was to discover these events and how each required a different, often cumbersome, sign-up process. This simple, yet unacknowledged issue leaves students across TAMU clueless on what events are going on, both social and professional. Dion addresses this challenge by centralizing all event sign-ups on a single platform. This offers event organizers exceptional advertising opportunities and offers attendees a streamlined, centralized hub to discover and manage all their upcoming events and parties effortlessly.

What it does

Dion is a website designed to facilitate large-scale events with high participant engagement. Tailored to meet the needs of both event organizers and attendees, Dion streamlines the entire event process—from seamless event creation and promotion to efficient participant registration—ensuring a fast, easy experience for all users.

How we built it

We first used Tailwind CSS libraries to create a general UI. Then, we created a backend on Firebase to store user data, and event information, and create indexes. Once the Firebase was set up, we were able to create a basic functioning page that stored events based on the user. Then, we added functions that were able to edit, delete, and sign up for existing events. Finally, to add one more cool feature, we were able to let users AI-generate their own images for their parties to make it far easier for them to organize and advertise their events.

Challenges we ran into

After 9 and a half grueling hours of creating 4 other failed projects, the idea of Dion was conceived at 9:30 PM on Saturday. Using Tailwind and CSS was hard to understand at first, but we were able to figure out how to use their libraries and create a decent UI. With the MAJOR time constraint, we put on ourselves by restarting at 9:30, figuring out all the features we wanted required a lot of overnight work. Getting the Firebase set up was also a big learning curve, and certain permissions were simply not working. Uploading images, especially, took a lot of work to debug and ended up not working on the database. Using ChatGPT to AI generate images was hard to understand at first as well.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Figuring out this website after hours of demotivation was rewarding. After not giving up, we were able to successfully create an application for a real problem that can make students' lives way easier if addressed. Not only that but being able to add cool features like the AI-generated images was very cool.

What we learned

We learned a LOT about what not to do during the first half of the hackathon. Not including new technical knowledge, the biggest thing we learned was that communication was the most important thing to work on. Once we were communicating with each other properly, we were able to finally successfully make a project. In terms of technical knowledge, we learned a lot about working with Firebase, debugging code, and how to use OpenAI's API to AI generate images.

What's next for Dion - College Events

This Dion website was just a proof of concept, we expect a better UI, a paid ticketing system, as well as an app version in future development. We hope to market this to A&M college students to create a centralized and convenient software that students can use to find new clubs, organize their events, and stay updated on the events throughout campus.