Library Together

Inspiration

There are so many public spaces in campus, including department buildings and libraries, however, students either just study in those spaces alone or rather stay at home for studying. To inspire all students come to make the best use of these spaces and their time, it is important to provide them with ways to publish their information and gather students together to do pair learning. Also, many times, students do not know others in the class he/she enrolled and hence student faced difficulties the coursework/assignments. Using this application, students can find other students in library who are working on same course and hence they can join them.

What it does

This is a platform for students to public and search information for group study, which gather them together in those public places on campus, such as department buildings, library study rooms and so on.

publish group study information. If the students can find existing studying group which they want or can join in, they can create one by providing their UNI, course name they want to work on, available location, time range, contact information. Then they can just wait for other students to contact them and decide whether to join in them or not.
search for proper group to join in; When the students want to join curtern study group, the web app will provide them with groups which are still available in the future. The students then can go over the list of courses and see what courses are those they want to study with others and find the one with the most suitable tim and location. After deciding which group to join in, the students can click the 'join Group button' to join, once the capacity is used up, future join will not be allowed
Update the group study information. If the hosts have some emergency coming up, they may want to update the time or location of the group study, they can go and find the group messages published by themselves and make changes. Since the hosts are likely to have contacted the joinees, they can inform the joinees of these changes by themselves when there are on mechanism to do this automatically for now.

How we built it

This application has 3 parts, like any web service:-

Front End is made using HTML, CSS, Bootstrap and AJAX. Calls are made from javascript to backend code.
Backend REST service is made using Python Flask. It has following apis :- i) createGroup ii) editGroup iii) getAllGroupsAvailable iv) getGroupsbyUIN v) joinGroup
Mysql is used as the datastore to store all the groups data. The above fetches/inserts/updates data in this database.

Challenges we ran into

Using AJAX to make calls from front end at some places took lot of time because neither of us have very good knowledge of Javascript. Also, we faced some difficulties in deployment of flask app to heroku.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are able to develop the end to end group create/update/show/join features and we are very much excited about it. We learned lot of new things that we never worked on. Eg. Python Flask, AJAX, etc.