PSet Posse

Looking for people to PSet with? You've come to the right place! Use PSet Posse to find other students in your living community who are taking the class, or did previously and are willing to help!

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Inspiration

Merely a week into freshman year, my teammates and I had realized how difficult it was to find classmates to work on problem sets together. Many of our classes had hundreds of students, and it wasn’t easy to find people who lived near us to work with. For each person talking about how happy they were they found a pset group and how much easier that made their work, there was another who didn't know other people in their classes. MIT is a big place, and it's a lot easier to navigate when you learn with the people around you and make friends in process. We want to promote the spirit of collaboration and teamwork with our app.

What it does

We decided to solve this problem by creating a website, PSet Posse, in which students can input their living community, the classes they were currently taking, and classes they were willing to help underclassmen in. After inputting this information, users will be given a list of other students who live near them that are taking the same classes and have also signed up on PSet Posse (potential pset partners) as well as upperclassmen who have volunteered that they have taken the class, done well, and are willing to help.

How we built it

For the back-end, we used Python to sort the data. Although the framework was initially messy, we successfully completed this task through object-oriented programming. Our python script reads in a file with all the data collected through the website and uses dictionaries to sort people into groups based on the classes they're taking. For the front end, at the beginning, we were planning on using Jekyll with GitHub Pages to create our website as none of us have any web dev experience. However, we soon realized that Jekyll only works with static websites and we needed to take input information and display results. We adapted an open source Bootstrap template to create our website.

Challenges we ran into

We had a lot of trouble with the web dev because none of us really knew what we were doing. Right now the sign up page is reading in the information inputted but it's not properly saving it. In the future we'd need to figure out how to save the data to a central server and constantly update the list of potential people to work with as more people sign up (which would probably involve creating account with logins).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of making progress on this project because while we all have training in algorithmic CS none of us have done any web dev or app dev and we were really unsure how that would go.

What we learned

Many of us learned a lot about how to use Github (not all of us had experience with it before this weekend). We all learned a lot about wed development and HTML and Bootstrap as well as the challenges and nuances of implementing even a straight forward idea. I think that it was also interesting when ideating moving from complicated ideas that sounded cool to realizing an easy way to make people's lives a little better often involves a simple fix.

What's next for PSet Posse

There's a lot of work to be done on our website but once we have a server and accounts, we could potentially test our website in our dorm (supposing we first navigate any privacy concerns of collecting data about people's dorms and classes, etc.) and see how useful it is.

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