HESFAR - OFFICIAL PPMK PORTAL

Inspiration

As Malaysian students studying in Korea, we noticed how scattered our communication channels were. Announcements and news updates were on Instagram, event registration links were emailed, attendance sheets were in Google Docs, and community photos were uploaded to Google Photos. This fragmentation made it confusing and time-consuming to stay connected. We wanted to build something that brings everything into one hub, making life easier for our community abroad. That inspired us to create this, a dedicated portal for Malaysian students in Korea.

What it does

This is a student portal and community hub. It centralises communication and resources by offering:

A news feed for official announcements
A registration port for official clubs and events
A photo gallery for community memories
A resource-sharing section (files, spreadsheets, forms)
A student directory to connect with peers
Study platform to encourage healthy competition amongst peers. In short, it’s a one-stop platform that replaces the need for multiple apps.

How we built it

We built PPMK as a web app using ChatAndBuild's AI-powered platform. We integrated with GitHub for collaboration and Supabase for database functions.

Challenges we ran into

Apart from the integration of Supabase's database feature, we encountered a lot of challenges. One of them is ChatAndBuild, which is an AI-powered tool. When we prompt a highly difficult or time-consuming task, it will eventually result in an error. We think this happened because the time constraint per prompt is limited. The AI hasn't finished coding, but the website decided the time is up and stopped the prompt's task. This results in the prompt's task only containing parts of the code, and not until it finishes. For example, the prompt to enable the language feature. The prompt stops when only 30% of the website is functional for language translation, which ends with a partially completed code. When the AI tries to tackle this error, it will result in the same error since it doesn't have much time to code until the missing part of the code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud that in just a short time, even though each one of us was busy with our daily lives, we managed to build a fully functional portal that unifies news, events, resources, and community features for Malaysian students in Korea. Seeing our idea come to life from sketches to a working platform was a big milestone, and we’re especially proud that it solves a real problem our community faces every day.

What we learned

Through this project, we learned how important it is to design with the user’s needs in mind, not just the technology. Even though ChatAndBuild simplifies how we code, without needing to know how to code, the important part is the idea that we brought. We also strengthened our teamwork skills by using GitHub for collaboration, dividing roles efficiently, and supporting each other under time pressure. Most importantly, we learned that even small steps toward centralising scattered tools can make a huge difference in creating a better student experience.

What's next for HESFAR - OFFICIAL PPMK PORTAL

We would try to tackle one of our website's most important features, database integration. With a working database, this website can enable all Malaysian students in Korea to have their own personal account, so that communicating, creating, and interaction would come to life. This is one of the steps needed to create a digital community of PPMK, Persatuan Pelajar Malaysia Korea.