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This is a sample page of My Dashboard
Inspiration
As college students, we are busy people. We have to go to various classes, finish our homework on time, and keep track of club events, college parties, dining menus, departmental talks, and job interviews that are happening on campus. Unfortunately, there aren’t any omnipotent web applications that allow us to keep track of all of them. Then it comes to our mind--what if we can see the events just in one page? We want to create a website that is specific to Rice students where they can check all the time-sensitive events all at once.
What it does
It gathers information from different websites that are crucial to student lives and display them all at once. In particular, it consists of a to-do list where the user can add, scratch out, delete his/her agenda, a Rice dinning menu where the user can browse freely the dining options over all on-campus serveries and restaurants, a Google Calendar which synchronize all the events the actual Google Calendar displays, and an “Opening Hour” table for Fondren Library, Recreational Center, and Coffee House where the user can check for the general opening hours of these three top-visited places at Rice University. Displayed on one page, it allows the user to check all the information at once without opening multiple pages.
How we built it
We built it using CSS, HTML, and Javascript. Essential codes are all written in a .html file. We've divided our project into four different parts and each of us was in charge of one part. They are, separately, the design of the to-do-list (mainly using CSS for formatting web page and Javascript for setting up event handlers), a view of daily dinning options (using iframe to screenshot dinning.rice.edu website), google calendar view, and essential time of the week.
Challenges I ran into
We've encountered countless troubles implementing our project. One of the major problem is that none of our group member know CSS, HTML, or Javascript before, so we're all learning while building our project. Sometimes, even a small feature would take us a long to implement.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
As JavaScript and HTML beginners, we’ve successfully created a new website which integrates information from different websites that greatly save students’ time in opening multiple web pages and losing track of the events. In particular, we’re proud of being able to extract data from Google Calendar and have it successfully displayed on the website.
What I learned
We’ve learned that creating a website requires clear logic, familiarity of the programming language, and a well understanding of computer architecture. For Python programmers, it is challenging in understanding how websites, browsers, and interact with each other and how to effectively combine JavaScript, CCS, and HTML in creating an interactive website. Moreover, we’ve learned that teamwork is extremely important in learning a new programming language since we can allocate different work to each teammate to maximize our efficiency. In the end, we can hear from each other of what they have learned and therefore know how to program in a new language in the fastest way.
What's next for My Dashboard
Even though hacking has finished, we're still looking to perfecting My Dashboard and adding more features to it. For example, we're going to realize the automatic saving of the to-do-list (as currently, the list'll be renewed after refreshing); we also want to extract information from more websites that are closely connected to Rice Students' daily life (eg. Facebook).
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