PlanIt

Inspiration

UCLA students frequently miss out on clubs and activities they would otherwise consider joining/attending because existing informational resources on clubs fail to tailor suggestions and spread awareness of club activities throughout the year. As UCLA students ourselves, our goal was to come up with an application that students can use to access up-to-date information about club activities that may be relevant to them through feeds and and a general, interactive calendar.

What it does

Club representatives can sign up to be on the web application and provide general club information (description, social media accounts, important dates/events, exclusive or non-exclusive, etc.) on a dedicated web page. Think Linkedin but for clubs, not people. Additionally, clubs can post to 3 feeds (general feed, categorical feed, individual feed) such that UCLA students can see events, open meeting dates, informational updates, etc. consistently throughout the school year. Users will be able to search through club pages and search/access categorical or specific club feeds that are relevant to their interests throughout the school year, facilitating more active engagement in both directions between students and on campus organizations.

How we built it

Tech Stack: We used a MERN tech stack. The frontend interface was handled in React (Javascript) and the backend was built with Express and Node.js. Used a MongoDB database to manage and store data. This version is designed to be a web application.

Challenges we ran into

• We had to reprioritize the main app features a few times to ensure the web app established its own niche compared to existing web applications that perform similar functions.

• We faced technical challenges relating to the frontend programming as whole because half of our group has had limited previous exposure to React, but all four of us needed to learn quickly and work on the frontend due to the size of the frontend workload

• Unusual web loading issues resulted in hours of debugging. While we were able to fix many of the features with bugs, some of our ideas had to be abandoned for the sake of completing the larger concept of the web application within the timeframe

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Surveyed over 80 students on campus about their interest in a web application like the one we developed and had a relatively high idea approval rate.

• First time building a web application for half of our team

• Producing a genuine innovation that we as college students would want to use and want to see used at UCLA and potentially other college campuses as well/

What we learned

• UCLA students feel in general that existing informational resources about clubs on campus are inadequate in terms of engagement and exposure to the UCLA student body

• A simple innovation of a potentially outdated formation for a club information website offers a large amount of uses cases and could redefine how students go about their club search

  • How to develop as a team, how to segment the project, how to leverage our individual skill sets to benefit the project as a whole

What's next for PlanIt

• Finish the development of the UCLA PlanIt site and continue to receive student user feedback until we are ready to launch the service

• Continue to fine-tune the UCLA model based on customer feedback

• Eventually transition into creating these websites for colleges across the US or even potentially other kinds of organizations like companies, non-profit charities, etc.

Built With

• express.js
• javascript)
• mern
• mongodb
• node.js.
• react