Inspiration
We noticed that many students would express interest in research, yet would be totally clueless where to find information regarding where to start searching for labs. Furthermore, we believe that, with tools like Ratemyprofessor and other community forums, there was a distinct lack of community knowledge regarding the experiences undergraduates have had in their respective labs. Our goal is to provide a centralized, streamlined platform to allow ease of communication between faculty and students, and among the student body itself.
What it does
Research Portal, first and foremost, provides a centralized, crowd-sourced (eventually) listing of laboratories on the UC Davis campus. It allows students to query for labs that cater to their specific interests. Further, it allows students to give candid opinions about their experiences with undergraduate research, and what a specific lab provides in terms of environment, growth, and difficulty.
Faculty and graduates have the ability to post specific announcements regarding open lab positions. Instead of having their openings buried deep within email chains, faculty will have direct and visible contact with the student body. This allows faculty to search for ideal candidates, while also allowing undergraduates to search for the ideal experience.
How we built it
Our web pages are served through the Flask framework for Python. A sqlite database stores all of our information on users, labs, comments, announcements, etc. HTML pages are generated dynamically through the jinja2 templating engine built into Flask.
Challenges we ran into
Time: A few things are still unimplemented.
- Comments front-end. The database is set up to store and maintain student comments, but the front-end does not yet implement adding comments to lab pages.
- Student/Professor validation/login. Eventually, we would like for there to be two separate account types -- one for undergraduates, and one for those currently involved in research (professors, postdocs, etc.). The researcher accounts will have the ability to edit descriptions of labs freely, while student accounts may submit edit requests (which will then be screened by a moderator).
- A (readable) domain name.
We had a sluggish start, unable to come up with a consensus idea until ~7pm.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very proud that we were able to accomplish a majority of what we set out to do in such a short amount of time with some very inexperienced web developers. Despite this, we were able to divide tasks relatively evenly according to skill level such that everyone was able to contribute.
What we learned
Integrating "front end" and "back end" is difficult and requires a good deal of coordination between developers. We also learned how long it takes to develop even a relatively small web application.
What's next for Research Portal
We hope to complete the unimplemented features listed above, and hopefully provide a public endpoint for real students and professors in the near future.
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