GiveBack

Inspiration

Our inspiration for this project was to help students in need of community service hours find local opportunities to serve. We also wanted to expand our projected users to include community members who have a free day to serve find opportunities. During our time at The Citadel we have to complete service requirements that can oftentimes be difficult to keep track of using our current system. Our hope is that GiveBack could be a good alternative platform for people and organizations to find ways to serve the community and post service events in need of volunteers.

What it does

GiveBack is a web application that, once you sign-in, brings you to an event list page that displays all of the community service events in the area. Users can then join events as they want and navigate to a page to create an event. Users can also navigate to see events they have joined and see the total number of community service hours they have with the app.

How we built it

This project was written to be run on a server running PHP and MySQL. For testing, it was run using the XAMMP cross-platform web server run locally. An SQL database with two tables were used. The first table contained user information (a unique id, password hash, username, email, and created date), and the second contained volunteer event data (event date, event length, location, facilitator, event name, and description). A backend intended to be written to manipulate both of these tables via the web interface, however due to time constraints, manipulation of the events table was not able to be implemented. The user interface was written in HTML but stored in a PHP file so that PHP scripts could be ran.

Challenges we ran into

Our main challenges were time and lack of experience doing MySQL, PHP, and HTML. Unfortunately, The Citadel had all sophomores do a leadership training exercise from 6am-6pm on 10/7/23, so we were all unable to start on our project until about 7pm. Do to the time constraint and missing the workshops we had to create a smaller scale project while still learning how to create a web application.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our group for still being able to learn a lot in a short period of time. Our main goal in attending this event was to learn more about web development and we have done so. Additionally, we have been able to implement team building skills and grown our professional networks.

What we learned

As sophomore computer science students we learned a lot. We learned not only the basics of building a web application like using HTML, PHP, and MySQL, but also business skills like public speaking, marketing, and thinking about the end user. Additionally, we had to implement different team building skills like exploiting our strengths and weaknesses in order to get things done in a condensed time frame.

What's next for GiveBack

With GiveBack we would like to spend more time making it more user friendly and implementing all of the functions we had originally thought of for it. Ideally, GiveBack would be a public interface running off of a server instead of a local host and have an improved graphic user interface (GUI).