The main display of the app on phone

Two of our team members commute to and from university. This means that if they have large gaps in their timetables, they often end up in the same place, not knowing how to kill time for hours. Despite there being many events possibly happening at the time, it is hard to know which ones are best suited to their interests, how they are feeling on the day and how easy it is to get there and back on time for the next lecture. It also means that they have fewer opportunities to socialise and make friends unlike students living in accommodation, meaning they feel left out and feel less like they are part of a community.

Our project is an app that syncs events to timetables, showing you what events are happening during frees and how to get there with integrated links to google maps. You are able to filter out your mood, the type of activity you'd like, university, quiet or sociable spaces, as well as showing cross university events, allowing more opportunities to meet different people. The app involves accessibility options like text to speech or speech to text and the option to use AI to filter out events according to the prompt given, allowing ease and accessibility in navigating free time to be productive.

Using Claude Code as an AI coding tool, we built the base of the app, using instructions from Claude. The foundation of the app had a demo timetable, where if a gap was shown, you could find possible areas nearby to go to, such as cafes or libraries. However, this did not show many real society events and was a lot more general as there was few options on the filter originally. Also, it was not linked to google maps, so you could not see an actual map of where everything was on the website. We then continued to use Claude in order to figure out how to use APIs to add different features to the website, using API to add a maps feature. While this was happening, two of us built a spreadsheet of real society events and other opportunities happening around London across KCL, UCL and Imperial. We then added this data into the app, adding websites from each society to allow easy access to see exactly what each event is. We also added the option on the app for societies to add their events by uploading a poster of the event and AI can separate out the components and add this as a choice during suitable gaps. We then added more filters, such as events, cafes, study, activities, deals, price, university, social, quiet etc, as well as adding a speech feature using ElevenLabs so that you can speak to the app, and Gemini AI will filter events for you. We added another accessibility feature using API of text to speech so a voice will read out your options of socials - this can be turned on or off. We then realised that the app did not have a live location feature - it automatically assumes you are at your last lecture, where you might not be so we used Claude here to provide us a step by step on figuring out how to add live location, which the app can now use. After this, we realised that the app does not add the event selected to your calendar for the day, so we changed it so that it will do this too. After this, two of us added a domain from GoDaddy, after we sat and decided a name - notthelibraryagain.club, and built the powerpoint for the presentation. We then tried to understand the code and make sure that it could be used on a phone.

One of the biggest challenges was that all of us had zero to little coding experience. This meant that we were unsure where to start, so we used Claude Code as an AI tool to guide us through this and help make the foundation of the app and add different features. Although we were very confused at the start, which took up a lot of time, over time we started to figure it out more. The second challenge was that the API stopped working on day 2, and we couldnt figure out how to get it back. To get around this, two of us tried to work on it using different AI tools like Claude and this allowed us to add the API finally.

Accomplishments we are proud of include understanding how apps are built - this is completely new to us and a new experience that we are proud of trying. We also feel accomplished that we are now more confident in using AI to guide us through projects and navigate new technology.

We learnt how to utilise AI to help build code and add new features. We also learnt how apps are built and what programmes and software are used to build this. We learnt new terms such as API's and how to debug code although this was a big challenge. We also learnt how to work as a team and delegate roles accordingly to get everything we needed to do done on time.

For SideQuest, the next step would be to add new features such as a 'Notify your friends' feature where friends can be notified if you are going to an event, so that if they are free they can also come along. Incorporating TFL to the app would also be a next step as this is a large part of commuter's journeys as the app can tell you whether travel routes are delayed so that you can know if you will make it to lectures on time. Finally, we could expand SideQuest to more universities like in Greater London or the Midlands.