Scholarly

Inspiration

As students of the CST program in BCIT, we noticed that a large majority of our classmates transferred from another program or came back from the professional workforce to broaden their career options. Because of this, we decided to create an app that would save students the time and money from choosing a program that they end up not liking, thus wasting time and effort.

What it does

Our app serves as a guidance for upcoming post-secondary students looking for programs to apply to in university. Our users would be able to search a general topic they are interested in, such as "Computer Science" and our app will filter out all the programs that have the "Computer Science" tag.

Additionally, students who have completed the program can return to the app and write a review for future students, sharing their experience with the program and how much they enjoyed their time there.

How we built it

We first planned out the potential pages that our app would have, using Figma. Next, we planned out how the database would store the information and how it should be structured. Then, we split up our responsibilities so that everybody would be responsible for a certain part of the project.

Challenges we ran into

Because our app works with a large data sample and we did not know how to use APIs to scrape websites for information, we had to do it manually by inputting the data into the database one by one. This was taking up a lot of time and because of our 24-hour time limit, we were starting to get stressed if we could end up finishing this project in time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our group consisted of four members who's participating in their first hackathon, so we were really impressed with the product we were able to produce by the end of it. Additionally, even though we are from the same program, we belonged to different cohorts, meaning this was the first time we ever worked on the project together as a group.

What we learned

We learned how important it was to capitalize on each group member's strength because it allowed us to achieve something much greater than if we worked on the same thing together.

What's next for Scholarly

There were a lot of features we would have liked to implement but did not have the knowledge nor time to do so. Some of which includes:

An API that automatically scrapes information into the database
A server for improved security
AI chatbot that would recommend users programs based on their preferences
Implement an actual backend server after hackathon → currently the frontend talks directly to db (security risk) → team had little experience implementing an express server so we decided not to do so for our mvp

Built With

Submitted to

nwHacks 2024

Created by

I worked on all of the front-end of the application, as well as workload delegation.

I spent most of my time in the beginning designing what each page would look like on Figma, establishing the requirements for the project and what the final product would look like/how it would function.

I assisted my group members in understanding the functionality of the final product so they could work more effectively on the backend.

Once my group members finished the back-end aspects of a page I created the CSS and navigational elements, making sure everything worked properly.

Sam Holtzman
I worked on the search page → querying the database and filtering results based on what is typed into the search bar. Also worked on rendering the filtered results onto the page. I spent the rest of my time helping editing js/html of my teammates and also helping them debug.

R-Lok
I worked on the backend making sure the courses page dynamically updated by pulling data from firebase and using template class in HTML to add sections to the page. I also helped with the front end on the course page. The rest of the time I helped with debugging and logistics.

Ranveer Rai
I worked on inputting data into the database and creating a review page that allowed the users to create their own ratings and reviews on the course. This would then create a new review document in the Firestore and calculate and update the overall rating of the course.

Leo Zheng

Updates

Leo Zheng started this project — Jan 21, 2024 02:46 PM EST

Leave feedback in the comments!

Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.