Inspiration
Our first and foremost criteria when brainstorming is that the idea had to be useful and effective. We learned along the way that Georgia Tech's campus closet does not have a website similar to the one UGA has. Borrowing a suit involves walking in, getting measured, and having to manually fill out a paper form to borrow a suit.
Therefore, we came up with the Campus Closet QR code system to make the progress of buying, picking up on the students’ side and tracking orders, inventory on the university’s side as smooth and neat as possible.
What it does
We built a website that allows people working at the Campus Closet to enter the size, gender, and type of clothing for a specific piece of clothing. The website generates a unique QR code for the suit, which then can be printed out and attached to the suit.
When a student checks out an item of clothing on the Campus Closet website, they will be sent an email and text with the QR code of the clothing. When they walk in to pick up the suit, they can scan the QR code to easily view the suit's information and check it out. Additionally, the student can rent out the suit by pressing a button on the website linked to the QR code. If they choose to rent out a suit, the website will tell them when the suit is due via text.
How we built it
The front end is built with HTML. The backend is done in Python using Flask and the clothing' data is stored in an SQLite3 database. The texting feature is done by Twilio.
Challenges we ran into
Since we can not meet in person due to distance, most of the communication is done online through Zoom. Coordinating virtually was very difficult, especially because we were a new team with many varying skill sets. We also had issues with finishing our project on time, because we knew we wanted to make our project the best it could be. On the technical side of things, we had a big issue with deploying our application to a production server due to our inexperience.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud to have accomplished the requirements we set out for the website! Even if some of us were new to programming, we still found ways to contribute to the project either by helping conceptualize how the website would work, testing the website, or creating mockups of how the website would work using Figma.
What we learned
We learned how to better create a project from scratch, going from conception to final product. We learned how to utilize tools like Figma to plan how we wanted our project to work. Some of us gained valuable experience in learning how to program a project, and some of us improved how we communicated and explained technical concepts to others.
Finally, we learned the importance of designing for the production server way ahead of time.
What's next for Ga Tech Campus Closet
In the future, we hope to add more advanced features to our website. We would like to expand upon the data that could be entered for each suit, such as the type of clothing (tie, pants, etc), and improve how our website looks so it can appeal to users. We’d like to add a way for Campus Closet workers to track whether a suit has been dry cleaned after being used, or is currently being used and the expected return date.
Finally, we would like a way for campus closet workers to be able to enter in data after fitting and measuring a student so that the website would immediately tell them which suits would fit the student, and whether those suits were available to be checked out.
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