Schdl

Inspiration

College is one of, if not the, biggest part of someone's life. Hopping from club to club, joining events, and studying continuously take up bigger and bigger chunks of college student's lives. While academics are at the forefront of college student's minds, the help that they need, namely office hours and study group meetups, continue to not have a proper home in integrating themselves into the average college students schedule. One of the most frustrating struggles of a college student is missing supplemental help that you need for your classes. Schdl aims to change all that.

By centralizing various external studying methods, Schdl helps the average college student stay on top of their studying and academic needs. By aggregating GTA office hours, Professor office hours, Supplemental instruction, and study group times and meetup places, Schdl enables college students to study more efficiently, quickly, and at all times of the day.

What it does

Schdl is a crowd-funded study/scheduling tool that takes inputs from its users through a request form and then uploads it onto a database. This database can then be accessed through the Schdl app. Search for the course you're having trouble in, and find upcoming office hours, supplemental instruction sessions and study groups organized by other students with their time and location. These sessions can then be booked or integrated with a calendar of your choice so that it can be viewed along with your schedule.

How we built it

All four members of our team worked and collaborated on unique aspects of the project. We used Javascript, HTML and CSS for the front-end. The back-end was developed in Python while MongoDB was used to build the database. We then used React.js and a bit of Javascript on both sides and to integrate the project into one whole application.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a lot of challenges on the way. From having to learn new languages we've never used before in one day to having to scrap a project due to the sheer impossibility of it, we were faced with obstacle after obstacle. We learnt to adapt and be agile with our coding to pivot into newer and more ambitious goals. As newbies to APIs, we also had a lot of trouble learning how to use them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud to complete this massive yet incomplete application merely in the span of 24 hours or so. We learnt a lot of new things, had fun, and networked with future employees and knowledgeable mentors along the way.

What we learned

We learned new languages, new frameworks, and new APIs. We also learnt to be adaptable.

What's next for Schdl

We plan to complete this project and completely integrate it in the upcoming weeks. It has the potential to be a very useful took for students at Purdue and colleges across the world. Additional factors that could be added to Schdl are the ability to automatically export to google calendar and implementation on different campuses around the world.