HW Board

Streamlines updates and notifications in a school based website, allowing for sharing insights and asking questions.

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Inspiration

As 3 Harvard Westlake students, we encounter all the typical problems that school presents. One of the biggest problems we were faced with was the disorganization of all the school related notifications. That's when we thought of the idea of HW Board.

What it does

HW Board is a centralized location for all of the students' notifications and announcements. Instead of having 3 applications with different information which you need to organize everyday, HW Board collects all of the other application's data and outputs it on the Board.

How we built it

We used Sublime Text as our base programming software. In Sublime Text, we used HTML to program the majority of the website along with some CSS and Java Script. We hadn't learned how to use these languages to program before, so we started off a little slower, trying to learn how to program in these new languages. Eventually by the end, we had gotten the hang of most of them. We also used some photoshop to create pictures of what we would hope our finished product would look like.

Challenges we ran into

As novice programmers, this hackathon was our first exposure to real world programming. For that reason, we ended up facing a multitude of challenges. Our first challenge, as earlier stated, was learning these new programming languages. With only some experience in Java, it was difficult programming in different languages. However while some were minute, there were several larger ones we weren't able to overcome. Being able to collect and post our data/posts on our website proved difficult as well as our voting system.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The design and the idea behind HW Board, overcoming the challenge of a new programming language, as well as learning a lot of what goes into a website.

What I learned

A lot of html programming, what it takes to build a complex website like ours, databases, and how to work on a team for a project like this.

What's next for HW Board

We want HW Board to become a viable replacement for email updates and discussions, and become a user-friendly environment for students and faculty to use. The goal is to polish up the systems and functionality and start testing with users to get to know how the product will be used.

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