StudyScout

The phone application!
The website!

Inspiration

We've all had challenging courses through our time in college. It's always better to study and do homework with a friend, but schedules are always busy no matter your major. How do you connect with more like-minded classmates? This is where we come in. Imagine always being able to find someone that is free to work with you and having the opportunity to make new friends along the way as well. You can meet new people and find solutions to your homework/studying struggles with a push of a button on our site.

What it does

StudyScout is a platform that allows students to connect with other Hokies and meet with them to collaborate on academics. There is a section that allows us to post when/where we are working on which classes and this can allow for more collaboration between students even if they do not previously know each other.

How we built it

We built this application in Python with a backbone of Streamlit that helps us have easy access to a high quality frontend while coding on the backend simultaneously. We found this really helpful with the time constraint of a Hackathon and allowed us to more quickly put our ideas into fruition. We also integrated MongoDB into our website and this allows us to store all the information of our users and update it live to show other users.

Challenges we ran into

The most challenging portion of building this website was integrating the MongoDB with our application. The implementation of the UI elements turned out to be more difficult than expected because Streamlit does not allow the same customization and freedom that normal web development with HTML/CSS/JavaScript would allow.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud of the way our website easily seamlessly flows for the user and quickly updates the information and allows them to find study sessions quickly. The integration of MongoDB made this all possible and was very satisfying to see finished as it worked exactly how we intended in the end.

What we learned

We learned a lot about using new tools and collaborating with Git and sharing code with multiple members in our group. We spent a lot of time working with new tools such as MongoDB and we learned the ins and outs of Streamlit as it was the backbone of our application. The delegation of tasks we had between our team members turned out to be very successful.

What's next for StudyScout

In the future we would like to add a messaging service on the website so that students can communicate with each other and collaborate more online. We also want to create a downloadable smartphone application that would make it easier for users on their phones to setup meetings or check information on the go. We'd also like to finish integrating a log-in feature for easier communication and more secure event creation.