Spartan College Admissions Bot

An example of our original source code

Inspiration

As students applying to college ourselves, research about colleges to apply to can be menial and taxing. In order to rectify this problem, we decided to design a web app with the intention of simplifying the college research process to allow for more time to focus on college applications and finalizing high school grades.

What it does

The chatbot allows for a user-friendly interface which gives the user the ability to ask any questions regarding college admissions and an open-source environment to discuss any potential discussions.

How we built it

We had used PyCharm primarily to write the main code for the chatbot itself, however, using the Flask software and SQLite database tool we had tied in user input and information regarding colleges. The program can be run on a local host server with access from PyCharm.

Challenges we ran into

The function pip was a built in function for python 3.10 (latest version). While discussing this, we had some problems installing pip in the command prompt which resulted in hours of configuration with our control panel in 3 different computers. Turns out the problem was in the IDE we used so we switched from VisualStudioCode to PyCharm. We also had issues with having the chatbot utilize text-to-speech. After this altercation, we stuck with text chatbot.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

With work in a field that the team does not have experience in, we believe we were able to create a useful and marketable application that can make a difference for people similar to ourselves. We were able to create a chatbot that can communicate with a database in order to create a user-friendly interface.

What we learned

We learned the applications of python into a SQL database and the more extensive connections with command prompt. We also learned how to utilize Flask in order to create a simple chatbot in a limited timeframe.