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MyNUDashboard Logo
Inspiration
As undergraduate freshman college students at Northwestern University, we understand that our future, especially how we plan out our next few years, is of the utmost importance. The first tool that is provided to us to understand what our journey might look like is the Degree Progress section of our Caesar Dashboard. However, the layout of this page feels mechanical and mundane, lacking a design that stimulates interest and general productivity to think about the future. This challenge served as our inspiration for our project, Salad.
What it does
Salad is a website whose current primary purpose is to provide two improved tools to track degree progress and view a student’s course schedule. To view a student’s degree progress, Salad provides a colorful pie chart that allows students to understand the breakdown of what courses they have already taken and what more they need to take to graduate in their major. Additionally, Salad provides an interactive calendar that allows students to view the course schedule and edit the calendar as they see fit.
How we built it
To build it, we primarily focused on web development using React.
Challenges we ran into
As we were building this platform, we ran into a variety of challenges. As this is our team’s first hackathon, we didn’t really know what to expect for our project. We spend a significant amount of our time learning how to use React, Javascript, and HTML/CSS in order to program our website. Additionally, as we were relatively new to using GitHub, we ran into some problems merging our branches together to create the final product.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
However, despite this, we were still able to create a platform that performs its intended functions at a basic level. While we are beginners and had had to overcome a huge learning curve, each of us were able to contribute significantly to our project. When implementing the course calendar we were able to implement a calendar API called Full Calendar that allowed us to quickly and efficiently set up making events or putting a class schedule. Additionally, we worked really hard on the pie chart and learned a lot about React and various JS packages like d3. Most of us didn’t have experience animating things on the front-end, so this was a good introduction, even if it didn’t have all the functionality we desired.
What we learned
After completing Salad, we learned that we still have a lot more to learn about web development and general, and we feel inspired to continue our programming journey in the future because of this project.
What's next for Salad
As we think about what’s next for Salad, we want to improve the unique functions of the website and improve its design. Although we were limited by our experience, as we progress through our programming journey, we can improve and diversify our platform.
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