Inspiration - Guidance counselors' workloads are incredibly imbalanced and are steadily increasing. In the US alone, a given counselor is responsible for advising over 400 students on average, even though the American School Counselor Association recommends that the ratio should be around 250:1. Students simply are not getting enough time with their counselors, and this leads to them being possibly unprepared throughout high school as they move into college and their careers. We wanted to create a tool which students could use to help them throughout high school and college.
What it does - Knct is a mobile application which provides any given student with extracurricular opportunities, from clubs and events nearby, to scholarships they can apply to. It surpasses current resources with the help of its user friendly UI, its stable and readily accessible database, and its niche focus. Students can log on the app at any time to see what's going on around them, and they can utilize Knct's journaling feature to keep track of the activities they participate in throughout HS and college, which helps them in the future when they are crafting resumes, applying to jobs, looking for internships, and more.
How we built it - Knct is a product of Google's Flutter and Firebase. We used Flutter to craft an appealing front end, and fed it information through Firebase's backend abilities. We also used Firebase for User Authentication. We also began to implement SchoolDigger's API to make Knct available to students all over the world.
Challenges we ran into - We spent the first couple of hours of the hacking period attempting to integrate Flutter and Firebase. Many Flutter packages were deprecated and we ran into many issues while adding dependencies and implementing outside packages in our application.
Accomplishments that we're proud of - We successfully integrated Flutter and Firebase after some trial and error and set up Firestore, User Permissions, and User Authentication. As first time hackers, this was a great experience for us as we were able to learn so much in such a short amount of time.
What we learned - Flutter is still very young and rapidly changing. Tutorials from just two months ago are already outdated and won't help too much. We learned about the importance of developing rapidly, and learned that computers have their limits. We also learned how to integrate APIs with Flutter, something we had never done before.
What's next for knct - Fine tune some details and release it to the App Store! After that, continue to develop and add new features such as student course selection by integrating the app with all districts around the country and world.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.