Focal Point

• 

  UIPath Background Process

• 

  Firebase

Inspiration

Often, we find ourselves having difficulty organizing all the different classes, events, and meetings we are involved in here at UF. We realized that college students everywhere have trouble with not only organizing these events but even with finding events that truly interest them to join. However, despite having Canvas to organize our classes, we have no resources to consolidate all of our club meetings, events, sporting events, and more which make up the other half of the University experience. As a team of mostly first-years, we experienced these difficulties first hand and sought to simplify the process of joining clubs and locating events to match college students of all years to their interests. Through this consolidated calendar, we hope to let everyone organize the overwhelming amount of information in this field to explore their interests and reach past their comfort zones.

What it does

Our product will gather events from club and university websites and display this consolidated data in a user-friendly calendar, with options to filter through categories of events to their preferences, allowing them to easily find events that fit their interests. The user will be able to "subscribe" to clubs and events that interest them, allowing them to easily see which events they are scheduled to go to. These events can either be seen on our site or added to a google calendar.

How we built it

Our product, Focal Point, uses a combination of UI Path and python web-scraping to gather calendar events from club websites and university calendars. This data is then stored in a real-time database using Firestore, which pushes this information to the website. Our website has filters for different categories, which when selected, will automatically remove and reorder events according to the user's desire.

Challenges we ran into

When our team first began to work on this project, due to many members of the team never having participated in a hackathon event, we had to quickly adjust to the workflow required in order to successfully complete the project. Additionally, we had to quickly learn how to wireframe a webpage, scrape webpages, as well as work with Firebase's databases, due to many members not having experienced them before.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successfully implementing web scraping

Working with Firestore inside python

Relatively polished web design

What we learned

Web-Scraping

Firestore

Wireframe design

What's next for Focal Point

We'd like for the website to be implemented by other universities, using our scraping process to acquire all of the club and event data for that school and presenting it with our product. Additionally, we would like to continue working on website design and adding features to the site, such as a search bar for club names and other features to create better suggestions for students looking for events they would be interested in. For example, by adding features that display what other users who have subscribed to your events also are involved in.

Built With

• beautiful-soup
• firestore
• python
• uipath
• webapp