Inspiration
Do you ever find yourself looking for someone to study with, but have no one to do so? Sometimes its hard to chat with people in class or in between packed hallways, which makes it hard to mingle and meet other people to study with. With Study.Club, this is a thing of the past. We make study groups easier to organize and also, facilitate the process of meeting classmates that share similar interests.
What it does
Study.Club is a free social networking service that allows students within a university to create local study groups within their vicinity. By using location services, and real time data, we strive to facilitate studying amongst students across the whole nation, and hopefully across the world.
Studying alone can be difficult, and to some people, it might even be ineffective. By allowing students to create study groups tailored with specific topics and professors within their university, we open up the possibility of meeting fellow students and boosting up grades in the process. Learning is always better when you have fun!
How I built it
By using IBM Bluemix as a service provider, I created a simple Rails backend app that serves as a JSON API for an iOS application. The iOS application was built using RubyMotion, which is an implementation of the Ruby programming language that runs on iOS, Android, and Mac OS X. By using location services (Apple's MapKit) and push notifications provided by Bluemix services, Study.Club provides real time data of study groups (or clubs ;) ) happening near universities. Bluemix is targeted towards universities, but could possibly be expanded to target cities as well.
Challenges I ran into
Team formation. Unfortunately, I started out with a two team mates, but both ended up dropping the idea and leaving for the day. It is 11:40 and I have 10 hours to finish building a fully functional iOS app. It'll be a fun night!
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Finish the Rails API backend with user authentication and full restful interfaces in a couple of hours made me pretty ecstatic. Also, being able to integrate IBM to manage my Rails application on top the Heroku platform helped me our greatly and boosted my productivity a lot. I couldn't have done without it.
What I learned
Perseverance is the key to success. It might sound cheesy, but I've given 24 sleepless hours of coding to make this a possibility. I'm not hear to win, but I'm really proud of the progress I have made, and the importance of working together with other people around you to learn and improve your ideas. A lot of the people I talked to and sat next to helped me out with different aspects of the application (front end idea, name brainstorming, etc). It was a great experience and I would defiantly do it again.
What's next for Study.Club
Even though Study.Club is not available for purchase for cheap (according to Mark, the .Club representative, the domain is worth $50,000), I think Study.Club is an appropriate name for the service since we are getting people to meet and form 'clubs' of people who they can comfortably study and hang around. Although our primary concern is getting people to study more, it is important to promote student networking. It always good to have buddy that can help you out in classes, which makes university more enjoyable. A good parallel to this is this hackathon. By making new friends and working together towards a common goal, a difficult problem can seem simple. Study.Club aims to make students more interested in getting together to study, and making it more accessible around their universities.
P.S. The repositories and IBM Bluemix domain are named BreakfastClub (our first idea, based on the movie), but we decided to go with Study.Club even though the domain is way out of our price range. Study.Club reflects our ideology better than Breakfast.Club.
TL:DR; Study.Club rocks! :p
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