Scholarly Shop

JAMHacks_team

Inspiration:

At schools these days it costs well over 100 dollars to buy unused textbooks. The question we are asking is: is it worth it to buy a new textbook that would cost well over $100 when you can buy used ones from students that don’t need it anymore for a much cheaper price? Many would argue that it is not worth it to buy $100+ worth of textbooks every year, but they are still forced to buy them because they have difficulty connecting with students that have used ones.

What it does:

The scholarly shop allows students to buy and sell textbooks in a secure, affordable, and honest fashion. The students and parents that are selling can price textbooks as they wish, and parents and students that are buying will also have a variety of different items to choose from, which creates competition and forces prices to stay low. Furthermore, we incorporated a function for school students to exchange used uniforms. Not only does the scholarly shop help students save money from the unnecessary purchasing of overpriced textbooks and uniforms, we are also saving the environment by lowering the mass number of trees cut down to be used for textbooks every year, and it has the potential to make a significant global impact if our product is used on a global scale.

How we built it:

We began by performing the front-end web development for each of the six pages in our website. We then used the back-end web development to store the necessary data in the required parts of our website, although, unfortunately, we were not able to finish all of the back end web development in time for the presentation today.

Challenges we ran into:

One of the main challenges we ran into in the development of our website was the implementation of an SQL data storage base. Because none of us had experience with back-end web development and couldn’t perform the designated task in time, we had to change our end-goal for the website and reassess our strategy.

Accomplishments we are proud of:

One very tough struggle that we experienced was to have the login screen appear when pressed from the hero page although, after two hours, we finally managed to connect the login and all of the other pages of the website.

What we learned:

Over the course of JAM hacks, we realized that the most important thing is to take 30 minutes-1 hour to brainstorm all the ins and outs of our idea to have the most successful hacks. As well, plans are not made for no reason: if we make a plan, we should all stick to it - otherwise, it would just be wasted time. In essence, time management is key for all hackathons and it is important to budget each and every second of your time to ensure the best result.

Built With

Submitted to

JAMHacks

Created by

I worked on the backend with Django (my first time EVER doing backend) and learned a lot about how it works (although I still don't completely understand it). I also put all the pages together and organized the directories.

Kais Jessa
McGill University - Honours Math and Computer Science
I worked mainly on the front end, specifically in the creation of the "add new listing" page on the website. I created the page in its entirety. I also participated in the back end trying to create a SQL database using Django, but was not able to successfully run it.

Shaan Hooey
I worked mainly on the front-end part of our web app, namely the homepage and the "textbooks" page. I also tried implementing mySQL into our web app, but there wasn't enough time.

Jimmy Li
I worked on the front-end, I created multiple webpages, essentially, "the login", "the uniforms". I also participated in the web design of the landing page and home page.

Shuaichen Liao
jamesliao123