Scoop

scoop up friends and a deal in college

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Inspiration

More than 60% of students reported feeling “very lonely” in college over the last year. 72 percent of college students experience financial stress with 50% from monthly expenses and 60% from tuition costs that can reach as high as about $95,000. So what if we can tackle students’ loneliness and financial stress with one solution? All 4 of us are college students who have witnessed first hand both how expensive college is from dorm shopping to tuition to monthly expenses and also how much waste is created with many students throwing perfectly good items from fridges to furniture away to save space. Furthermore, we all understand why loneliness is so common in college as we all navigated the hurdles of adjusting to a new environment and to making new friends from scratch.

Additionally, we wanted our product to be inclusive of all college students, so we chose to create our own sign in/sign out database as some schools don't use Google Accounts. Additionally, we chose an easy to read and simple interface/design to make it easy to use and appeal to all students.

What it does

Scoop allows you to easily scoop or purchase students’ items at a discounted price while also encouraging connections to form between peers. In a two-way street, sellers earn money on items they no longer need without the stress of dealing with shipping to costly locations and fees that take away from their earnings in traditional marketplaces. Buyers get to buy typically expensive items at a discounted price. And most importantly, the delivery process encourages interaction as the buyer is encouraged to contact the seller to organize a meetup time and location for delivery. Each students’ items in the marketplace get to help another student.

How I built it

We used Javascript, CSS, and Visual Studio to build a website from scratch along with Figma to help plan out the design. We also used MongoDB to store all data users input.

Challenges I ran into

One challenge we ran into was ensuring the Sign In, Sign Up, and Sign Out pages properly worked and directed people to the right pages as for a long time, we could not get the MongoDB to connect properly. Additionally, we needed to make sure those who signed in or signed up were the only ones who could make listings and access the shop, which was difficult to direct without an error occurring.

Additionally, the backend API was difficult to configure and write as there was no immediate feedback of whether we were right or wrong like the frontend.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm really proud that we were able to get the both frontend and backend working as well as our database to actually encrypt the passwords and store sign in information along with listings.

What I learned

We learned how to design and create a website as this was all of our first hackathons plus our first websites we have written from scratch with no templates.

What's next for Scoop

Scoop's next step is to add more universities to our website to create more community online shops for students to help each other save or earn money. We also want to offer the ability to chat between buyer and seller to allow for stronger connections to form within the community and bring people who have similar hobbies together even if they may have not met each other before.

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