Trailhead

Inspiration

The inspiration for our project was part of why we decided to participate in Hacklahoma this year- to support our professional goals! One of the biggest challenges our team has faced has been finding opportunities to develop our skills outside the classroom. Trailhead is designed to connect students to experiential learning opportunities based on their career goals and interests.

What it does

Trailhead is an online forum that allows students to develop their own pathway to success. Students can post about career opportunities they have been involved in, and give anonymous reviews on their experience. Based on a student's area of discipline and aspirations, Trailhead recommends postings and tailor-made career development pathways.

How we built it

We used React to design a modern, responsive frontend that was clean and easy to use. It uses Node.js to run the JavaScript to allow users to share and search for opportunities. Google Gemini API processes the user’s description of their interests and converts it into a database query. Our database, built on Mongo DB, stores opportunities, and AI integration returns semantic matches, not just keyword matches. This is displayed to the user as a suggested path of opportunities that have been posted by other users.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest issue we faced was integrating the different parts of our website together. We knew we wanted to utilize Gemini API calls to suggest opportunities, and needed a database to store tags, but implementing them together smoothly took some time. It was challenging to learn many new technologies quickly, and make them work together seamlessly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of how much we have learned this weekend about both front- and back-end website design and AI integration. This project ended up a lot more complex than our original idea, using AI and MongoDB to bring our project to the next level above a basic website.

What we learned

We learned what the process of full stack development entails. We practiced using Node.js to develop the user interface, Gemini API to enhance recommendations with AI, and MongoDB to hold a database supporting AI functionalities. We also learned how to work together as a team and delegate tasks when different team members have different levels of knowledge.

What's next for Trailhead

We hope to refine our search and sort algorithms to make it easier to find opportunities that fit you perfectly. We can refine our Gemini prompts to do this. Additionally, we want to add the ability to create user profiles to save searches and your past path. We can use these past paths and interests to make our recommendations more accurate to real lived experiences.