Event Mode

Discover Events That Unite The Next Generation Of STEM Leaders

Comment

Inspiration

We are all students in grades 11 and 12 right now, so naturally, we’re out visiting universities and other post-secondary programs to see where to apply. The advice we commonly receive from staff is that getting out into the community and taking breaks from the computers at our homes is essential to gaining experience and making important connections. However, many of these events, programs, and scholarships go under our noses because they're so difficult to find.

What it does

We built a beautiful, user-friendly web app that lists hundreds of STEM events for youth in Ontario, as well as a monthly email blast that will help people like us get out there to hackathons, tech events, STEM competitions, and more.

How we built it

We used many different technologies in the creation of our project. Using python and multiple APIs, we gathered data on nearly 1000 tech events from all over the web. We consolidated all of our data into a nonrelational firebase real-time database and called it onto our front end using Angular. Finally, we implemented the Mailchimp API to share the data in the form of a newsletter to all of our users.

Challenges we ran into

Unfortunately we were not able to use the APIs for Meetup.com or Facebook.com to get tech events, because the Eventbrite API shut down service on December 12th, the Meetup.com API rejected our requests, and the Facebook Graph API shut down service for event search . In the end, we used smaller event APIs, such as Eventful, and PredictHQ to build our event list. Another challenge was getting the Mailgun API to work. In the last few hours of the hackathon, we switched to Mailchimp to send emails.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of how professional our website looked after doing a lot of CSS work, and we are proud that we got a real-time database working for our website after visiting the workshop about it (also, we used Google Cloud Functions to delete events from the database).

What we learned

For a couple of our group members, it was their first time using APIs and GitHub. However, by the end of the event we were all comfortable making GET and POST requests and collaborating on a repository.

What's next for Event Mode

  • Provide users options to sort and search the events (by deadline, location, etc.)
  • Add different types of STEM data such as math contests and scholarships.
  • Create Python scripts to automatically update our database daily.
Share this project:

Updates