Rate-My-Duke

Inspiration

There are a plethora of mentorship programs, resources, and other advice platforms here at Duke, but we wanted to centralize that platform for everyone so that people can come and hear the advice of a wide variety of Duke students, each having had a diverse array of experiences.

What it does

Our Rate My Duke website is a student review and recommendation platform on which Duke students can share their thoughts and opinions about a wide variety of categories, including classes, extracurriculars, dining, and more. The main function of our website is to serve as an instantly-updating thread with new user posts to help students discover everything Duke. Students using the app can go to the forum page and click the add button to make a rating. They can then add a title, a category (eg. Durham Life, Dining, etc), and a description for what they would like to post about. After clicking the submit button, their rating will appear as a post on the forum page. Their post on the forum page also has five stars which they can click to indicate their rating out of five.

How we built it

Rate My Duke was built using React as a front-end framework to help us create the website aesthetics. This allowed us to use the React Context API to globalize data, mainly about the content of the posts, throughout the sections of the app. We also utilized components from the MUI library to create many of our website features.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was navigating through React and Javascript. Additionally, our website involved a lot of CSS and it was often difficult to arrange components in the specific way we wanted. Another challenge, as is the case with most hackathons, was the lack of time. There are other features that we wanted to implement, as discussed in the “What’s Next” section, but we didn’t have the time to do so.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to create a functionality where user input updates the content shown on the forum page. We also incorporated animations on the front page. Lastly, we are proud of our teamwork because, for all three of us, this was our first hackathon. Additionally, this was the first time we all coded a website entirely from scratch, so we are proud of our final product, especially given the time constraints.

What we learned

We learned how to branch and merge using Git. We became more familiar with React and how to bring components together to create a functioning website. We also learned how to assemble various individual parts of a website together and to divide up the work.

What's next for Rate-My-Duke

For the future, we want to optimize our user experience on the website. We want to find a content moderation API that scrapes our user reviews and searches them for malicious language. However, during our time in this hackathon, we could not find a free API that would allow us to do so. Furthermore, we would ideally love to authenticate users using Duke’s Shibboleth authentication system so that all of the users on this website are confirmed Duke students.

Built With

• context-api
• css3
• html5
• javascript
• react