CalFresco

Inspiration

University is a busy time. The constant flow of assignments. The weekly quizzes, lectures, labs and tons of practice problems— it's no wonder university students are so stressed. As university students, we know about how difficult it can be to manage courses, extra curricular and social activities.

What It Does

CalFresco makes it easier for students to find events on campus allowing them to take breaks and more effectively manage university life. Every Sunday, the available time slots on Google Calendar are filled with potential events that they can attend.

How We Built It

Our project uses Google Calendar API to determine free time slots in a users schedule and finds new events for them to participate in. We also used Build on StdLib to populate events happening on campus into Google Sheets. The StdLib Scheduler allowed us to execute the task on a weekly basis. Lastly, we used Google Apps Script to create events in the calendar using the data from the sheet.

Challenges We Ran Into

With limited knowledge of APIs we first needed to spend time understanding what we are dealing with. Originally, we planned to use Facebook Graph API to find events, however recent updates and privacy reasons meant that we could no longer find events by location.

Accomplishments We Are Proud Of

We pulled information from Google Calendar and using stdlib to populate Google Sheets.

What We Learned

How StdLib makes it simpler to implement APIs and more about how Javascript and Node.js can be used to pull and analyze data from Google products.

What's Next For CalFresco

Including more info for each event such as Eventbrite links so students can easily find where to purchase tickets, along with sending notifications when the calendar has been populated.