STEM HUB

Inspiration

Interested in STEM but feeling overwhelmed by what you’ve heard about it? What is it, the crazy number of hours you have to spend on assignments that everyone seems to be complaining about, the imposter syndrome or the feeling that you just aren’t good enough for STEM?

Fear not, STEM HUB presents you with the ultimate STEM-management tool. As women in STEM, we’ve been lucky enough to experience the joy of this crazy world of STEM and we refuse to let old stereotypes keep anyone back! Find all the resources that you need in one place.

As four college students in STEM fields, we know the struggle of finding good resources to assist us with our rigorous curriculum. We also know how difficult it is to stay focused on accomplishing our many tasks. It does not help that STEM subjects have a notorious reputation for being ‘boring’ and ‘too hard’ and have even been referred to as ‘overemphasized’, dissuading many from pursuing or even entertaining the thought of a career in STEM. This is especially disheartening to members of marginalized communities, who might be the first in their families to attend college. Our mission is to provide an encouraging and uplifting space for STEM students to excel in their studies by providing important resources for health and well-being in addition to compiled resources for each STEM field. Pages for each field include notable figures to help students learn about people who have been tremendous assets in their particular disciplines and can serve as examples of success. Additionally, we have a study session feature where students can track their tasks, time study sessions and breaks, and curate study playlists.

What it does

Allows STEM students to find resources that will be helpful in their particular fields of study and information about notable minority figures in these fields, along with tips for well-being. Users can use the study session feature to time their sessions and breaks, keep track of tasks remaining, and listen to their favorite music.

How we built it

We used Angular as the framework of our website and incorporated the functionality using TypeScript. On the home page, we integrated Speechly into our search bar so that users can use voice to navigate to each of the components of our site. We also utilized Spotify's API to curate a user's top 10 played songs and let the user play their favorites! We used html to format the pages and css to style them.

Challenges we ran into

Integrating Speechly was a bit of a challenge, as none of us have used a speech-to-text API. The biggest challenge was navigating the tutorials to figure out how to incorporate the feature on the web. (Special thanks to Taylor Blankenship and the WillowTree team for the incredible support/troubleshooting help!) With the Spotify API , it was difficult figuring out how to get an access token from the Spotify user, displaying the data from the user, and figuring out the appropriate endpoints to be using. We ran into a few challenges incorporating the timer feature and allowing for user input to change the timer settings. The task list also involved some struggles with getting the tasks added to a modifiable list.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Integrating Speechly and the Spotify API!!

What we learned

We learned how to create a task manager with an interactive checklist and modifiable timers for study sessions and breaks. We were also able to successfully incorporate the Speechly API and Spotify API.