Inspiration : We are in the process of looking for and applying to universities. When trying to find information about university admission, we found it quite troublesome jumping from one website to another. However, once we discovered Garuda Hacks, we put this observation in mind and decided to make an app where we can look for thorough information about different universities around the world all in one place.
What it does: DiscoverU gives students the ability to research about different universities without having to jump from one website to another. It displays the rankings of the university, their location, courses offered, and their requirements. Students can also add universities they are most interested in to their Favourites List. Furthermore, there is also a “calendar” feature to see important dates such as the deadline of applications.
Challenges I ran into: As we are all beginners in using Android Studio and using Java language, we had to figure out some things ourselves even when we encountered errors when making our app. When we tried to combine different parts of our code, errors tend to appear and we had difficult time trying to fix them due our lack of experience with Android Studio. Us being high school students and having exams coming up meant we also had lesser time to finish the projects due to the assignments we were given from school. Not to forget, the Covid-19 pandemic did not allow us to meet up and forced us to do everything virtually.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of: As we are beginners in using Java Language and Android Studio, we are very proud to be able to create our first app. We learned everything from scratch and researched about it from the Internet. It was quite time-consuming and was definitely not easy, but we made it! We can now say that we have developed an app ourselves, despite it being simple. It is not something everyone can say, and we are extremely grateful that GarudaHacks gave us the opportunity to start our journey in coding.
What I learned: Having to code an app from scratch took a lot of time as we had to figure out our errors and correct it. However, in this process, we also got to learn more about the use of Java Language and Android Studio. Without these errors, we would not be able to expand our knowledge. This includes the different layouts available, how to create various app components and how to combine different XML files together.
What's next for DiscoverU: We hope to continue improving and developing the app by including more features. We also hope that we will be able to integrate database into the app in order to personalise it even more. Creating better designs of the app is also one of our wishes for DiscoverU. When we are satisfied with what we have, we hope to publish the app to the public one day.
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