Inspiration
Education is the problem that everyone's trying to solve. Especially in neighborhoods like Philly, getting children to get excited about going to school is a daunting challenge. We realized that we could get kids excited about going to school if they knew that they had something to look forward to at the end of the day. School Squad provides an easy platform for kids to commit to laid-back, fun activities after school that are organized by the numerous Penn students who enjoy volunteering with kids.
What it does
School Squad lets students vote on an activity they'd like to participate in after school for the month, and then matches them with groups of other children with the same interests and volunteer mentors from Penn and other Philly universities.
How I built it
Our app is built using Node.js and the Express framework. The users, squads, and activities are all stored in a mongodb database that's connected to the app through the mongoose ODM. It's hosted on Bluemix.
Challenges I ran into
Not enough time! And none of us had ever used Node before. Asynchronous programming is not easy to teach yourself...
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Figuring out how to run cron jobs that automate the process of assigning kids and mentors to their "squad" for the month. It works!
What I learned
Learn by doing and don't get caught up in reading all the ins and outs about every technology you're using before jumping right into it. A lot of time was wasted reading full tutorials without writing any code.
What's next for School Squad
... full functionality. But really, it would be cool to see how far we could take it. There is definitely plenty of interest among Penn students who enjoy hanging out with kids in the nearby neighborhoods, but logistics would be more difficult getting the schools involved.
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