Inspiration 💡
As university students with busy schedules, we have experienced the stress of discovering club applications last minute or missing them entirely. Instagram has not yet built a system where users can tag and be notified about posts with specific keywords or requirements; instead, this platform only has a system where users can choose to opt-in to notifications for all of the page posts. Therefore, to prevent students from feeling overwhelmed with multiple notifications irrelevant to applications, we decided to take the lead with our web application, Join the Club.
What it does 📆
Join the Club is a web application that allows busy university students to keep track of club application deadlines. By simply inputting your Instagram account credentials and the Instagram username of the club you would like to join, this web app will provide you with crucial details about when to apply.
How we built it ⚙️
We built our application using Selenium and Tkinter in Python. First, we developed a script with Selenium that would extract captions relevant to a club’s application deadline(s) in the last 60 days. Afterward, we designed the application on Figma and then used Tkinter to create an interactive user interface for our users.
Challenges we ran into 💻
Since the majority of our team was new to Selenium and Tkinter, there was a major learning curve in the beginning. More specifically, we struggled with getting the Tkinter interface to match our Figma design and vary inversely on multiple screen sizes. However, we were able to solve this by setting a consistent window size and positioning widgets relative to the window rather than their exact coordinates on the screen.
Accomplishments that we're proud of 🎉
Considering three out of four team members are new to Selenium and Tkinter, we had to learn and implement the use of these tools in a very short time frame. Thus, we are proud of the work we were able to accomplish with beginner knowledge! We aimed to create an app to extend the connection and community within University campuses and are proud to have done so. We are thrilled to have simplified application processes and therefore aid students in getting involved!
What we learned 📚
Throughout TechNova, we expanded our knowledge of UI design. As previously mentioned, most of us were new to Tkinter, and connecting our Figma design to the Tkinter interface was a struggle; however, it offered huge lessons on GUI and general UI design. Selenium was new to some of our team members as well and we learned how to implement a headless automated Chrome browser. All of us picked up on the new software without difficulty and we look forward to further developing our skills in the future!
What's next for Join the Club! 👩💻
In the future, we look forward to making progress with Join the Club. Some of our plans include adding additional schools, where students will complete the initial step of searching for their school and available clubs before they log in. As our application gains more traction, we also look forward to personalizing our “Other Clubs” page to display accurate results based on clubs that have been viewed the most over the course of the last week. As a challenge, we might consider recommending similar clubs to our users. This could be accomplished by tagging clubs by category. Stay tuned for our updates by liking our project!
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