Inspiration
Our main inspiration for our app, Rate My Club, was the popular site used by many university students around the world, Rate my Professors. As UCI freshmen, we had to spend a lot of our initial weeks joining every club we could and then dropping the ones that weren’t compatible. In the same way where students decide to take classes based on the quality of the professor, we wanted to give college students a way to select clubs based on different attributes, such as sociability and selectiveness. Having a site like this could’ve saved us a lot of time.
What it does:
In our app, the user can add ratings to different ICS clubs in UCI. The ratings include difficulty to get in (exclusivity) and sociability (social), and a general rating (stars), as well as comments. Once a rating is made, the review shows up on a secondary site exclusively featuring the specific club. Additionally, the averages in ratings for general rating, social ratings, and exclusivity is shown throughout our app.
How we built it
We built out projects incrementally, adding little bits and making them fully functional before adding complexity and style. Starting with a button that allowed a user to send a rating to the database, we then added functionality to return the accumulated data and post it to the site. We then split off, with our back-end developers adding things like different categories of ratings and our front-end developers working on our layout and UI. In the final stages of development, we came together again to finalize all of the functionality and design.
Challenges we ran into
Throughout the Hackathon, we faced a multitude of challenges. For instance, creating the connection between the front-end and the back-end and we needed advice from our mentor to learn how to use databases as well as use JavaScript to connect data from our database to the front-end of our app. Additionally, we were all unfamiliar with using HTML and CSS, so using
and making templates for our front-end was rather difficult.Since we were all beginners, we didn’t know much about the different syntaxes and capabilities of all the programming languages. As a result, we ran into many problems when trying
Accomplishments that we're proud of
In all, just the fact that we were able to develop a working website from scratch was a huge accomplishment in itself. We are glad that we were able to create something together, especially considering none of us had any experience whatsoever. In addition to creating new and complicated code, we are especially proud of our very own beach themed Petr Mascot that our teammate (Alexa) drew! Making our website gave all of us a boost of confidence in our computer science abilities, wwe really went from zero to hero!
What we learned
The four of us had pretty much no experience with web development, so everything we did in creating this website was freshly learned. The two of us that worked on the back-end learned how to implement and use back-end databases and javascript. The two that did front-end learned proficiency with HTML and CSS as well as good graphic design and layout.
What's next for Rate My Club
The next step for Rate My Club is to include all of the clubs and organizations at UCI as the current design only contains a few selected. We also would want to add a feature where users can add their own clubs into the site as well. Additionally, the current design can have improvements in the styling and formatting. After all the clubs at UCI are implemented within the program, we would also like to make this available to all the other schools in the world.
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