Inspiration
Coming from public schools into UTS, we were surprised at how many more resources we had here. We realised that we were very lucky to be in a school and community where these resources were provided, and that many capable students are often unable to access them. Public schools often don't sign up for many high-level math contests for example - why register when only 5-10 out of your 1000 students are at the level necessary to do well? Research opportunities, while they can be powerful on applications, are often very hard to get into without prior connections to professors. We wanted to create a platform for high school students to find and share opportunities and to break down the barriers present currently.
What it does
Opportunity Block uses an algorithm similar to those of popular social media apps to recommend local opportunities to students based off their interests. We hope to emulate the user experience of scrolling Instagram or TikTok, except the infinite feed of time-wasting content is replaced with one full of possible, interesting experiences.
How we built it
We used Flask, Python, and HTML to create a web app and SQLite databases to store information.
Challenges we ran into
All of us don't have much experience with coding (only one of us has coded in any serious capacity before, and even they haven't made a project in years), so we had to learn how to use these libraries essentially from scratch in a day. Also, we were very busy over the weekend so we only had a couple hours to spare.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud at how modular our code is. Variables are clearly defined, it's easy to follow the order of code, and even if we went back to this project later, we could add more features.
What we learned
How to use Flask, SQL, and Python and how to integrate them with each other.
What's next for Opportunity Block
It was hard to implement all of the features we wanted to do into one weekend, but we hope to improve the recommendations algorithm to use AI and improve the UI.
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