Inspiration
We are all aware that collaborative working can produce a better workload than working alone, and our teammates also spend most of the time with friends for projects and self-study. However, we recognized that most Penn State students feel challenged to find students in the same class due to the significant number of students, especially on the first day of each semester. Therefore, we came up with a few questions. What if we allow students to find students in their courses? What if we allow them to share their schedules with friends with just one click? And we made an application that could answer these questions.
What it does
Our application will be a student-friendly application that can improve school life. First, we will ask each user to sign up for this app for safety. After logging in, the user can add the courses with three elements: course name, course number, and section number. Then, the user can view the courses they've input in a list form by clicking a calendar-shaped button. What's more, the application also contains Social Networking Service(SNS) features so that the users can find people in their courses and share their schedules with them.
How we built it
First of all, we started to brainstorm the ideas for the application, such as programming language, programs, and app features. After a lot of thought, we decided to use Java with Google Studio for programming and designing the application. In the middle of the progress, we realized that the database is necessary for storing students' email, passwords, and courses. And we thought Firebase, which is a platform made by Google, would be most suitable. With hard work and effort, we could finally implement our ideas into one application.
Challenges we ran into
There were indeed some challenges we had to face in order to develop this product. Even though we knew that Firebase was the critical part, we weren't sure how to apply this tool to our project. So we had to spend hours familiarizing ourselves with this program. As a result, we could find a solution by transferring strings to bits and organizing the information into different folders. However, another problem appeared. While we tried to call back the data, the information kept showing up as "null" on the screen. This time, we printed the data one by one to ensure the code was calling the correct one. These were the method we used to make the application function.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
As first-year students at Penn State, we were more fluent in Python because Computer Science courses cover the language. So Java was not our first option. However, we challenged ourselves to have an adventure with Java and came up with a functioning application.
What we learned
We exactly went through the process that Computer Scientist goes through by solving the problem in the real world with programming. From this, we noticed that we could also be Computer Scientists. Additionally, we all earned how to interact with a server using a google Firebase server for the first time.
What's next for PSUStudyFinder
PSUStudyFinder definitely make us adventurous. We could grow their knowledge of network programming by visiting various workshops and sessions. Thanks to these opportunities, we were able to take the first step toward the programming. We are planning to develop our interests with such opportunities, so we hope PSUStudyFinder could continuously provide us with exciting activities.
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