PetrCAL

A place where you can find all your favorite Petr drops in a single place!

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Inspiration

The inspiration for PetrCAL comes from a desire to bring the UCI community together and foster school and campus spirit. UCI’s Petr Runs are famous as a popular, anonymous campus scavenger hunt for custom stickers of Peter the Anteater, started in 2018 by a student who shared simple sticker “drops” on social media. The culture has grown, with students creating their own unique, non monetized Petr designs. For Zothacks 2025, our team built a centralized platform where students can access and track Petr related events and Petr drops, providing a single, user friendly platform instead of having to check multiple Discord servers and Instagram accounts. This platform connects people through shared experiences, encourages participation, collaboration, and engagement, and helps students celebrate campus traditions while strengthening the sense of community.

What it does

PetrCAL provides a centralized, intuitive platform for all Petr drops at UCI, making it easier for students to engage with campus traditions and feel connected to the community. By allowing students to easily plan and track events, the calendar ensures they know where and when each drop is happening, displayed clearly by day and week for each quarter. Beyond convenience, PetrCAL strengthens campus spirit, fosters participation, and cultivates a shared sense of excitement, making UCI's mascot experience more accessible and impactful for everyone.

How we built it

  • We started off with building our idea within Canva to visualize how our website would look. Then we split up the work into the frontend and backend. For the frontend, one person designed the homepage on Canva for easy view, while the other built the homepage with React. Another person worked on the second page with the week view and worked on making the headers for each of the days we were going to display for our "calendar". For backend, we built it using Python utilizing FastApi for the web framework and Fireplace to create a database for the petr drops. Functions are used to pull data form the database to display petr drop info on the website. This includes the name of the drop, who is hosting it, date and time.

Challenges we ran into

A challenge we ran into has to do with the fact that all of us had very limited to no experience in frontend/backend development and coding in the languages that we used. We ran into difficulties with Google Calendar implementation and firebase admin set up. We initially planned on doing a calendar UI, but due to time constraints had to settle for list view. Despite these challenges, we were able to find alternatives and hone our skills into learning the new languages and the new apps that we were using. For the calendar interface, we switched it to a list view which was much simpler to implement yet is able to achieve the same functionality that the calendar interface was supposed to.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have come together as a group to create a project that we were passionate about and also learn more about programming and coding in general. Before joining the hackathon, a lot of us had no experience in the process of creating a project from scratch so it was very cool to see something that we imagined a day before become a reality before our eyes through our hard work. We are also proud of figuring out how we were going to implement a way we could show the weekdays and the unique Petr drops as clickable parts underneath.

What we learned

We learnt new platforms like Github & VSCode, while also learning new languages like HTML/CSS, JavaScript, and Python. We also learned about the importance of splitting the work up into equal parts and working on things together. Without splitting up the work in the beginning, it would have been very hard to have even gotten anything done for our project because of how involved each part of the project was. We were also able to learn the importance of the idea and going from an idea to an actual product. Because we all had limited experience in hacking and hackathons, we overestimated what we could manage to create, however, as we went through the 12 hours that we were given we were able to get the hang of seeing what we're able to do and make our vision more realistic.

What's next for PetrCAL

  • PetrCAL will authorize verified Petr creators so they can post their drops for the websites and be given admin roles so can manage the site and also approve future Petr creators. Petr's have been pretty notorious to track, since there's so many Petrs being made over the years. That's why we plan to create a Petr archive to keep track of all Petrs being made. This will not only be useful for traders, who would like to find Petrs for drops they weren't at, but also for preserving the work of Petr creators for future UCI students to appreciate. We want PetrCAL to be used for as long as petr drop culture is around, so we would like the project to become open source so it can be up-kept for years to come.

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