Hotspot

Gamify your college experience by visiting campus hotspots and earning points! Points can be traded-in for exciting prizes!

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Inspiration

We chose to develop a mobile application under the theme: Create a project that improves the life of college students. Given the pandemic, several college students lost out on the opportunity to make more friends, attend fun events, and experience college to the fullest. With students back on campus, we wanted to find a way to motivate everyone to step out and attend college events so that they don't miss out too.

What it does

  • Our app shows users (UIUC college students) a list of various university-wide events.
  • The events are displayed as cards with details including name, location, date, time, and more.
  • Events are ordered by date and time
  • Students can "check-in" to an event with a private code that is only given upon entry.
  • The app checks to make sure a student doesn't check-in to the same event twice
  • Students can also add custom events to the app. In the background, our app develops a random check-in code for the new event, to prevent the creators from getting "free" points for their own event.
  • The app features a secure log-in system.
  • There is a leaderboard that encourages students to compete with others and participate in more events.

What makes it unique

We already know that there is the Illinois App that lists several on-campus events. However, we feel that currently there is no incentive for students to participate in these events. Instead, with a points system and leaderboard, students would be more engaged and excited to participate in college-wide events and compete with friends. Our app achieves this incentive based system!

How we built it

We built the application using AWS Amplify and X-code.

Challenges we ran into

Prior to this hackathon, we never used AWS Amplify, so we had to spend some time going through tutorials and creating test applications before working on our final product. We also had issues with AWS pull conflicts and datastore errors. We had to spend time debugging both the front-end and back-end in order to overcome these errors.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the final application that integrates several views to create a smooth and likable user experience. We are also proud of developing an app that works correctly with the back-end AWS systems.

What we learned

We learned how to use AWS Amplify and integrate it with Xcode for iOS development.

What's next for Hotspot

Next steps include working with local business to provide discounts/gift cards/free merch for the top few students with the most points at the end of each month. Currently, we have a feature that allows students to add custom events to the app. In the background, our app develops a random check-in code for the new event, to prevent the creators from getting "free" points for their own event. As an extension, we would like to create a "Pending events" tab that allows other users to vote for custom events. If an event reaches 20 votes, then we will publish it to the main Events tab. In the future, we also hope to create a "Starred events" tab to allow users to star events they want to attend. We could also add a notification option to remind students of the events. Finally, we would also like to extend the project to include other college campuses. We could also extend this beyond colleges to allow users to view events in cities of their choice.

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