Pekalos

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  Figma

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  Brainstorming

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  Website Content Brainstorming

Inspiration

From our experience as highschool students we have realized that while there are plenty of educational resources on the internet, these resources are scattered, making it hard for students to find and utilize them.

Realizing this issue our team decided to create a platform which catalogs and organizes these resources making them easily accessible for students who cannot afford traditional educational material such as textbooks and tutoring programs.

What it does

Our platform hosts a feature that allows students to discover the career path they wish to go down. They can do this by taking the career survey that helps us to gain a better understanding of who they are and what their interest lies in. The information will then go through an algorithm on our website which tells us which careers match the interests of the user. Once the user knows what career they wish to pursue, our platform will provide a roadmap of how they can accomplish this by redirecting them to resources which can help them develop the necessary skills.

For the students who already know what they want to pursue, they can instead navigate straight to the educational resources section which has a simple and organized structure, and learn from the provided resources. These resources are not limited to academic subjects but also practical life skills such as financial skills, time-management skills, and culinary skills.

Another highlight of our platform is the forum and mentorship features. On our platform users can post and create forums that allow them to ask questions and discuss real world issues with other users. Users can also create classes that other users can join, where they can teach others in a peer-to-peer format about fields they are experienced in.

How we built it

link(https://www.figma.com/file/ULe8ZG9rxgxJG3LFBGtgZq/Pekalos?type=design&node-id=0-1&mode=design&t=DIxkYYsrPuemL0Rd-0) We envisioned the layout of our website using Figma, a collaborative web application for interface design. Once we had a general idea of how the website should look, we put together a basic layout on Replit. The layout was then stylized with CSS and was equipped with additional functionality using Javascript. The last steps we took was to attempt to create a server-sided database where we could store the user’s information and profile details.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge in this project was the time constraint, it was our team's first time competing in a hackathon and we weren’t used to developing projects at such a fast pace. We tried our best to mitigate this issue through proper distribution of tasks and scheduling.

Another challenge we faced was lack of experience. With little web development experience we faced issues in the implementation of features we envisioned. To overcome this we spent a lot of time learning and trying new tools to help the development of our website.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Looking back at our project, we found the website design to be stunning. This was mainly due to the use of planning the layout through Figma. The website also hosts two features, the side navigation bar, and the search bar, both of which were done through the use of Javascript. This was another part that made us proud since we had no knowledge about Javascript prior to building this project. One last accomplishment we are proud of would be from the attempt to make the website store information on a server-sided database. Although we didn’t do it in the end, we did however develop some knowledge about how it can be accomplished for our next project.

What we learned

During this hackathon experience, our team learned the importance of time management. We found that allocating tasks within the tight schedule requires careful planning and adjustment.

We also learned languages like JavaScript and PHP. And due to our unfamiliarity with them we encountered various technical challenges. However, through collaborative problem-solving, we learned how to break down complex issues, and identify the core problem.

What's next for Pekalos

The next steps we envision for the development of Pekalos are the implementations of the forum and mentorship features, as well as cleaning up the development of current features such as the survey and career recommendation.

We also wish to expand our database of resources and assemble a team to help regularly expand and perform quality inspection of the catalog.

Built With

• css3
• figma
• html5
• javascript
• php
• replit