StudyPartner

Inspiration

There is one thing that every college student dreads, more than exams or grades or strict professors: not having a class with any of your friends. However, this experience is incredibly common, among both upper and lowerclassmen. In universities where a large portion of time is spent studying, study groups are a vital part of both the social and academic circles. But it can be difficult to figure out where to start. Other apps can help confused students find others in their classes but not their study habits or contacts. It’s all too easy to just give up!

This is a vastly overlooked issue – one that we’ve taken on ourselves to solve, through our application StudyPartner.

What it does

StudyPartner lets a student see other students in their courses willing to study together. It shows the emails of matching students to let students contact one another.

How we built it

React, JavaScript and the SIS Public Course Search API to find JHU courses.

Challenges we ran into

1. None of us were experienced with developing an application from scratch so we found it difficult to divide up the work four ways - it was hard to foresee the technical requirements for our project and make sure that four people could work on something useful simultaneously.
2. We developed our app with React and none of us were well versed in it so it took us relatively long to do complete simple tasks.
3. Working non-stop was tiring! We never code for 12 hours at a time so the hackathon was mentally and physically exhausting. That said, it was a good learning experience in that we realized the various nuances of developing an app from the ground up

What we learned

The first and perhaps the biggest challenge we encountered was, surprisingly, nothing related to coding. We spent hours coming up with an idea to realize. On our sketch paper, there are many big philanthropic ideas, however, we settled on something small, but relevant to every student – study with others.

We all also made an attempt to focus on areas out of our expertise. We worked on databases, wireframes, JavaScript, HTML, and mostly from scratch!

During the last 36 hours, we fixed endless small bugs, added small functionalities, making small progress. Building a product from the ground, as we come to realize, is not always making big decisions, and making breakthroughs as portrayed in blockbusters. It is, as everything in the world is, a combination of small efforts, contributed by all members.

What's next for StudyPartner

1. Adding a matching algorithm that matches students based on course, major, year, and other preferences.
2. Let students message one another through the web app without needing to provide their emails.

Built With

• javascript
• node.js
• react