Piazza 2

User profile page of our Piazza improvement, with a short description, posts that the user submitted, current and previous courses taken
Login page of our Piazza improvement, having a functioning login section, as well as an about us section.
Main page where you can read/make questions
A simple 404 page

Inspiration

With our team composing of computer science majors, we know of the need for resources, such as easily accessible responses to our questions. However, the current version of Piazza is unappealing, disorganized, and hard to follow. Taking inspiration from Piazza, we created our own forum website, making it our objective to create a welcoming, but also organized and practical user interface.

What it does

Our project is a simple yet appealing, easy-to-use remake of the existing platform Piazza. Of course we couldn't recreate all the Piazza website, but we focused on remaking the most confusing parts/ugly parts of it, including the log in page, the forums page, and the profile page. Our project has similar functionalities as piazza (at least the basic ones), but with a user experience that will get students their answers in no time!

How we built it

We started by bouncing ideas off of each other for each of the tracks we were considering. Due to our knowledge, we decided with a simple recreation and improvement of a website we were familiar with, and thought we could improve, Piazza. We started off with designs in Figma and Canva while our basic GitHub repository was being made by one member. We assigned one person to the backend and dealing with django, since that was his expertise and the rest of us started on the frontend, helping each other out when we could.

Challenges we ran into

One of the most significant challenges we faced during the hackathon in general was coming up with a track and a clear idea for our project. Even when we already knew what we were going to do, the simple act of recreating our ideas in code was extremely difficult. Frontend wasn't as bad as expected, although it did require some serious effort. However, working with django was a struggle, as we haven't had any backend, especially with this framework. There were so many ideas we wanted to integrate, but due to the limiting time and experience, we ended up with a project that, although satisfies our expectations, still leaves room for serious improvement.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Most of us had minimal experience with building applications, yet all of us really dived deep into this project, learning and contributing the most that we could in such a short amount of time. Overall, the effort we put in and the growth we had during this Hackathon was what we were most proud of.

What we learned

Although we watched a couple tutorials on react and django, it wasn't until this moment that we started to comprehend them more. During the project, we learned more about react and how to actually use it to build aesthetically pleasing websites, as well as some backend using django to handle user authentication. However, we also learned more about HTML and CSS, as we looked through elements and styles to decorate our project.

What's next for Untitled

Even though a lot of the front end using React has been completed and designed, there's a lot of room for added functionality of the website. A lot of the User Interface is hard coded and provides limited opportunity currently for custom user profiles and user questions.