SportSwap

Inspiration

Our inspiration for this app stems from our experience with looking for an enjoyable activity that allows us to be physically active, but that is also affordable and goes along with our lifestyle and schedule as students. This struggle has led us on a mission to create an innovative app that facilitates the borrowing and trading of fitness and sports equipment.

What it does

The Fitness Gear Exchange Marketplace App called Sport Swap is a platform that connects fitness and sports enthusiasts who want to buy, sell, or exchange new or gently used fitness equipment, apparel, and accessories. This app provides a convenient and cost-effective way for users to access high-quality fitness gear while promoting sustainability and health by extending the life cycle of these items. Our borrowing system and trading system allows for an affordable option for users to see what activities they like to do in their daily lives.

How we built it

For this project, we used Django to make the website. We started by creating a virtual environment to isolate its dependencies. We then used Django’s built in authentication feature to enable users to sign up for an account and login. Then, we created users and items and allowed users to list whatever items they wanted to trade. We added the ability to zoom in on items see information about the item like description, category and what they were looking to trade for the item. We also added a browse section to try and filter what item the user wants. Finally, we added a small chat feature for the user to initiate a meetup to trade their item with another user.

Challenges we ran into

As new programmers and being very new to hackathons, our team did not go into Recess Hacks with much programming experience. We used online websites, courses and tutorials to guide us as we created our website. We initially had the idea of creating a mobile application with React Native but were faced with many challenges in terms of setup. The IDE and Node.js versions were incompatible, not allowing us to access the features of React Native. Subsequently, we could not customize and implement certain features into the app. Moreover, we could not implement the API into our app for recipes, which was our initial idea.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team was proud of all that we learnt during the Hackathon in terms of web development and ideation. We also had to sort through many lines of code and problem solved, which taught us a lot about perseverance, but also strengthened our critical thinking skills.

What we learned

We learnt alot about front end development in Django and Python through our time developing our webpage. We also learnt about teamwork and collaboration as we had to delegate different tasks to different people based on their strengths. For example, we had to assign some people to work on the ideation and prototyping of our webpage and others to work on the actual development.

What's next for SportSwap

We are hoping to expand sports and make it a mobile application. We want to emphasize the importance of physical exercise by creating a goal setting and tips section. In addition, we believe that nutrition is a very important aspect of health. To educate our users, we have a mission to provide a section in our app so that they can find personalized recipes that meet their preferences and dietary restrictions. Even if they are a busy student or need quick options that are on the go, they will be able to find them on our app. We also strive to streamline and make the process of borrowing and trading equipment safer and more affordable. We plan to implement security checks and more secure communication for our users.