IVC Meetups: Connecting Students for Collaborative Success Inspiration As a student at Irvine Valley College, I often found it challenging to connect with classmates to form study groups. Striking up conversations in busy classrooms just to coordinate schedules felt awkward and inefficient. I realized many students might face the same hurdle – wanting to collaborate but finding the initial coordination difficult. I believed technology could bridge this gap, making it easier for students with shared academic goals and compatible schedules to find each other. That’s why I created IVC Meetups.
What it Does IVC Meetups is a web platform designed specifically for IVC students to facilitate the organization and discovery of study sessions and other academic meetups. Here’s what it offers:
User Profiles: Students can sign up and create profiles, detailing their general availability and the subjects they're interested in studying with others. Event Creation & Discovery: Users can manually propose specific meetup events, detailing the subject, time, location, and other relevant information. All proposed events are displayed in a filterable list and a visual calendar view. Commit & Comment: Students can commit to attending events they're interested in and use a commenting system on each event page to discuss details or ask questions. AI-Powered Scheduling: The platform features an intelligent weekly scheduler. An administrator can trigger an AI process that analyzes all users' availability and subject preferences to automatically propose relevant study group sessions for the upcoming week, complete with suggested times, locations, and potential attendees. Dynamic Event Images: To make events more visually appealing, the system uses the OpenAI DALL-E 3 API to automatically generate relevant cover images for newly created events based on their subject, even checking for semantically similar existing images to reuse. How We Built It IVC Meetups is a full-stack web application built primarily with:
Backend: Python using the Flask web framework. Database: Flask-SQLAlchemy managing a SQLite database for storing user, event, commitment, and comment data. Authentication: Flask-Login handles user registration, login, and session management. AI Integration: The OpenAI API is used for: The weekly scheduling logic (powered by gpt-4o or o3-mini models). Generating event card images using DALL-E 3. Frontend: Standard HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, enhanced with: Bootstrap 5 for styling and layout. FullCalendar library for the interactive calendar view. Other Libraries: python-dateutil for flexible date parsing, email_validator for signup validation. Challenges We Ran Into Integrating the AI for the weekly scheduler was complex. Designing a prompt that reliably interpreted diverse user availability descriptions and generated valid, useful event proposals required significant iteration. Handling date and time parsing robustly, especially from user input and AI suggestions, was another challenge [cite: 24-28, 70]. Securely managing user sessions and ensuring data integrity across different features also required careful implementation. Lastly, demonstrating the multi-user nature effectively required using separate private browser windows due to standard session cookie behavior, highlighting a potential area for demo improvement.
Accomplishments We're Proud Of We're proud of creating a functional platform that addresses a real student need. Successfully integrating both manual event creation and sophisticated AI-driven scheduling provides flexibility for users. The automatic generation of relevant event images adds a nice touch to the user experience. Building a complete system with user authentication, database persistence, and multiple interactive views (list, calendar) feels like a significant accomplishment.
What We Learned This project was a great learning experience in full-stack development, from backend logic with Flask and database management with SQLAlchemy to frontend design with Bootstrap and JavaScript libraries like FullCalendar. We gained valuable experience in integrating third-party APIs, particularly OpenAI's powerful models, and learned a lot about prompt engineering for complex tasks like scheduling. We also deepened our understanding of web application security fundamentals related to user authentication and session management.
What's Next for IVC Meetups There are several exciting directions we could take:
Transcript Integration: Implementing the idea of allowing users to upload PDF transcripts to automatically populate their profile, especially the 'Subjects of Interest' field. Enhanced Matching: Improving the AI scheduler to consider more factors, perhaps proximity preferences or more nuanced availability parsing. Notifications: Adding email or in-app notifications for new relevant events, comments, or commitments. Demo Mode: Exploring ways to build a "demo mode" to make showcasing the multi-user functionality easier without relying solely on private browser windows.
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