Join What Club?

Inspiration

As college students, we have way too many choices when it comes to clubs and organizations on campus! We wanted to find a way to sift through the hundreds of options and find the ones that are right for us.

Side note: We spent some time asking around for a VGA cable, so we named ourselves "VGA Odyssey."

What it does

Our app recommends clubs to you based on your interests. Then you can see some of the projects that a club has done. Waste time scrolling through the clubs no longer!

How we built it

Web scrape the GWU clubs page with a python script to extract a list of the clubs and their information.
Count the words and frequencies in the text to provide better metadata for later.
Set up a backend API that makes the club data available. It also connects to the Recombee API, which is a recommendation engine.
Create a frontend that connects to our backend API. It has an input for the person's interests, and displays clubs in a nice card format with the image and info.
Create some demos of the clubs using Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and an FPGA. These would sit in the student org center for students to check out and see if they are interested in joining the club that created it.

Challenges we ran into

Deploying the node.js app to a digitalocean server was not straightforward Web scraping took way longer than expected

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built the darn thing! It looks clean an minimal We have some cool hardware stuff

What we learned

How to use a pi sense hat! Monitor refresh rates can be measured with a light sensor. How to use React Bootstrap. Not to trust every API you see... coughrecombee*cough*