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A view of our landing page - with login and logout feature and buttons to navigate and create new suggestions/users
Inspiration
Recently, the California wildfires resulted in very unhealthy air quality. As a result, many students felt sick at school, yet school was still not canceled. We wanted there to be an easier way to reach administrative figures at our schools to make suggestions or even protest some of their decisions. However, we know that students usually have common complaints, and it would be a waste of time for adminstrators to have to read through every suggestion. This is why we wanted to create a forum where the most popular suggestions could gain traction, and administrators would be able to see what factors of school need to change the most urgently.
What it does
Our website, schoolspotlight.tech allows users to post suggestions for their schools onto an online forum. There, they can upvote suggestions that they agree with. All the suggestions are sorted from most popular to least popular in order to optimize efficiency for administrators. Students can also link petitions that are related to their suggestions.
How we built it
We used Express to set up the preliminary framework of the project. We stored the information collected with mLab and MongoDB, and encrypted passwords using bcryptjs. We used GitHub to collaborate, and Heroku to deploy our website.
Challenges we ran into
At first, it was very challenging when we were connecting the .tech domain to our website. However, after receiving help from mentors and looking at documentation online, we were finally able to deploy our website with a .tech domain!! Also, since we are not as familiar with backend development, we ran into some issues with node and connection to our database.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were able to deploy it and we think it looks really good and has all the preliminary features completed. We worked well together, through struggles, to come up with a finished product that we are proud of.
What we learned
We learned to work better together as a team, and we improved our debugging skills as well. This experienced also improved our development abilities too because we learned a lot about what causes errors and some of the most efficient methods of coding.
What's next for SchoolSpotlight
Have a special view just for administrators where they can specify how many upvotes one suggestion must have for them to consider it, and an administrator verification. Additionally, we would like to implement a confirmation of attendance at a school by confirming using a school email.
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