Inspiration
Inspired by gamifying apps like Habitica and the popular “swipe” feature from Tinder, we aimed to transform the tedious and stressful task of scholarship search into an engaging experience. We noticed the issue of unapplied scholarships and envisioned a platform to make these opportunities easily accessible and captivating for students.
What it does
ScholarSwipe dynamically presents scholarships as swipeable cards, populated via a web scraper. It leverages the OpenAI API for filtering scholarships based on user prompts, streamlining the search to match personal preferences and qualifications. It is an engaging platform to ease the scholarship search.
How we built it
Our backend harnesses the power of Selenium which created a web scraper, meticulously navigates through scholarship websites, capturing key information by identifying specific HTML tags. This process allows us to aggregate data from countless scholarships across various platforms into a comprehensive JSON file, which then populates our dynamic card stack. Leveraging AI, ScholarSwipe intelligently filters scholarships based on user prompts—such as showcasing only nursing scholarships when requested—ensuring a tailored browsing experience. Meanwhile, user preferences and selected scholarship favourites are securely managed within a MongoDB database, offering personalized engagement. Designed with the student experience in mind, our front end adopts the popular and engaging 'swipe' mechanism, delivering a quick, seamless, and captivating way to explore scholarship opportunities without any hassle. The front end, designed with a student-centric approach, mirrors the engaging simplicity of popular 'swipe' interfaces. This provides a swift, intuitive, and captivating scholarship browsing experience, devoid of any hassle.
Challenges we ran into
The main hurdles included bridging the frontend and backend seamlessly and dealing with external distractions and time adjustments (such as delayed Uber Eats deliveries, missing food orders, and losing an hour due to Daylight Savings).
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We mastered the art of interdisciplinary collaboration, uniting students from marketing and software development to create a project that blends insights and knowledge from both fields. We proudly developed a functioning full-stack application in under 48 hours, incorporating learned concepts and marketing strategies, as well as technologies from both our Marketing Management program and Computer Systems Technology program, achieving a seamless client-server architecture integration.
What we learned
Emphasized mastering core features using familiar technology stacks to ensure a solid foundation for the application. Interdisciplinary collaboration was very insightful and we learned a lot from both disciplinary streams.
What's next for ScholarSwipe
Future developments include automating the scholarship application process and expanding the platform's scale to accommodate more scholarships and users.
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