Grow Free

Opportunities to GROW for FREE

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Inspiration

As a group of first-generation, low-income, and international students, we decided to work together to solve one of our biggest challenges: the struggle of finding free programs, internships, competitions, extracurriculars, scholarships, free exam prep materials,..etc. By utilizing our skills both in front-end and backend, we decided to build a website that contain daily updated resources, and opportunities that would range from academics, international students college search, to free research oppotunities and voluntary mentors.

What it does

Our website is all about three main goals:

  1. Opening Doors to Opportunities: We facilitate students access to newly added high-quality free opportunities that have the potential to ignite growth in the students' educational years. These opportunities include summer programs, competitions, internships, fellwships, research, scholarships and many more.

  2. Improving Students' Academic Abilities: ** By providing various **free resources for both international and USA students to help them in their exam prep, college search, finfinancial aid, research, and competitons prep materials.

  3. Guiding Students financially: The website provides a reliable source for students to learn and find free courses about financial literacy, scholarship navigation, budgetting help,..etc as it represents one of the biggest struggles that faces them when they go through the process of college admission. 4.Connecting students who are earger about reaserach:The website enables the students to fill out a form with their name, email and interests to get connected to a mentor or a research peer to work together producing great work.

How we built it

Combining our knowledge in front-end and back-end, we were are able to construct this full stack websites in which we used the following technologies: 1.Django: : As a python framework, it was used as the backend framework, in which we desinged the database, the admin page, the views, and url redirects enabling the admins and users to add and view various resources and to connect to mentors online.

  1. HTML: It was used in the front-end to construct the basic structure and elements of the website. 3.CSS: It was used in the front-end in the styling and the animations 4.JavaScript: It was used in the front-end to add logic to html&css

Challenges we ran into

Through out the project building process we ran into numerous challenges that ranged from technical bugs to questions about how would we maintain the website's activity and newly added opportunities. For instace, while coding the django app, we faced many problems related to database models and relations between different models, for example, one problem we faced was the relation between the tag that each opportunity has and the opportunity itself taking in consideratfg feature that we wanted to implement. So, after some research into the different database relations, we decided to make the relation ManyToMany Field as it was the best one that fits. Additionally, we also faced some problems related to the front-end, specially with css and javascript. However we were able to solve them and continue on.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Through out the project, we ran into various problems and struggles. However we are really proud of being able to manage our time , splitting out the work, and collecting a large dataset of resources that would us and all of the community.

What we learned

By building project, we learnt a lot of valuable skills and tools. We learnt how to manage our time, how to read the documentation of vairous technologies effectively, how to work with databases, how to construct and define relations between tables and how to style things using css effectively, ..etc.

What's next for Grow Free

Looking ahead, we're focused on two key priorities: 1.Global Accessibility: Our aim is to make Grow Free accessible worldwide. We're exploring hosting options to ensure everyone can benefit from our opportunities and resources.

2.Ongoing Updates: We're committed to regularly updating our offerings through the admin panel. This ensures our platform stays valuable and relevant for students seeking growth.

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