jUNC

Sharing is caring, and jUNC is the perfect place to share and care at UNC! With jUNC, students can exchange academic resources, used items, caps & gowns, tickets, services, and more at low or no cost.

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Inspiration

As a UNC student, Melanie knows the pain that comes with purchasing expensive textbooks, iClickers, and lab PPE, only to use them for a semester before never needing them again. Recently, a family friend loaned her a cap and gown from their graduation, so that she wouldn't have to purchase a new one. She was so thankful, and it made her wish that reusing single-wear items like the cap & gown was a possibility for students who may not have alumni connections. Once the idea was born, she began to see other uses for such an application--recalling the iClicker she bought for one class and never used again, and the countless times she has seen students offer up student basketball tickets in group chats, often with no takers. This app seemed like a perfect solution to the unfortunate waste Melanie has witnessed at UNC. We all enjoy saving money and avoiding waste, so we thought this was a great idea to implement.

What it does

Situated at the jUNCtion between good financial decision-making, community-building, academic support, and sustainability, jUNC is about more than just junk, it’s about students supporting students in ways that tangibly impact their academic experience. jUNC provides UNC students with a place to sell or give away used items such as textbooks, calculators, dorm room necessities, and graduation attire. Students can arrange to send tickets for events (for example, student tickets for basketball games). There is also a services category, for students looking to offer tutoring services, form a study group, or find someone to interview-prep with. jUNC is exclusively for UNC students, meaning that all exchanges can be made on-campus, promoting safety and convenience for students. jUNC also incorporates OpenAI, allowing users to see how much money they save by acquiring items second-hand rather than buying them new.

How we built it

We used React for our frontend and Node JS and Express for our backend, and we containerized the project using Docker. We used the OpenAI API to integrate AI into our application and used some information from the following tutorial to help get set up: Tutorial

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a lot of little bugs as we went and had to resolve several merge conflicts as we pushed our code to GitHub. One major struggle was getting the AI savings report to work, first with learning how to integrate the OpenAI API, then giving it a prompt that would deliver the desired response, and finally trimming the response to allow it to render well on the page.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we got the application to be ready to demo with so many features in the given time, with some of them being products of our first ever experience using that technology. We also think that our idea could be genuinely helpful to students at UNC. Finally, we are happy that we were able to be so productive while also having a blast connecting with other hackers!

What we learned

We all came into Pearl Hacks with different skill levels and strengths, but each member managed to work with something new and go out of their comfort zone. Melanie had never made a web application before, and had very limited Git experience, so she gained experience in version control and working with JSON files and React. Caroline and Sebine had more experience with web applications and coding, but Caroline integrated AI into an application for the first time and Sebine set up a working web application from scratch for the first time. We also learned a lot about the process of developing a new project and adapting it with new ideas as we went.

What's next for jUNC

Our next steps include making jUNC a full-fledged PWA that is able to be downloaded on mobile devices, adding an in-app messaging feature to allow exchangers to communicate, additional security and payment capabilities, login capabilities using UNC’s secure login portal, and making minor improvements to the current functions of the application.

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