Inspiration
As new students at Penn State, it is a lot of work trying to decide on which clubs to focus on, much less trying to find out all the different clubs that exist. Currently, Penn State does have a list of all possible clubs but there is little to no information about most if not all of the clubs. Furthermore, clubs also have pretty bad websites which are not informative and are often out of date. Recognizing this, we have decided to put all of this information into an App, making it easy to update and share this information to all incoming students.
What it does
Any club or organization at Penn State can enter their info (name, contact information, information about what the club does, major activities throughout the year, officers, etc.). Once this information is available, every student with an account is able to see the different clubs and choose if they want to join said club. Each club can choose a different status. For open clubs, anyone can join at any time. For closed clubs, members must be added by an existing member of the club. For [request] clubs, members must request to be added. Once the student is in the club, they will be sent any notifications for updates and activities occurring that the club publishes. (We will probably implement the join club features later)
How we built it
We created it in android-studio, which is an IDE for creating apps for android devices. Two people worked on the project concept and graphic design, while the rest worked on the actual coding.
Challenges we ran into
All of us are pretty new to computer science and have not had much experience making such elaborate projects before. Because of this, it took a lot of learning to figure out how every part worked, such as creating the app, implementing graphic design, creating a database, and making a clean user interface.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of everything we learned and the team building experience we shared. It was really hard for us to come up with an idea at first but we eventually got there, and then everything fell into place. We are probably most proud that we identified an actual problem that all of us had, and that we can use our app in order to bring tangible change into the world and make the stressful life of a college student a little bit easier.
What we learned
Because none of us had a ton of experience with databases or app development, we learned a lot about how android studio works and how to build a relational database.
What's next for PSU Clubs
Essentially, we would like to see PSU Clubs implemented across Penn State. For this, we would turn our MVP into an actually, optimized app so that various clubs around campus can start adding their info and students can start using the app. Eventually, we would like to add more features such as joining the clubs (as discussed above), a form of a chat, and even profiles and accounts in order to facilitate all the features we've discussed.
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