Inspiration
When we got the theme, a few of us naturally gravitated to this similar idea of building a site where students could connect. We all entered our first year in the Sixth Form, and the first year where all our subject choices were our own. We believe that connecting like-minded students can lead to great things being created. Our website aims to reduce the friction of that connection by creating a specialised space specifically for students.
What it does
Our page consists of an A levels section which each subject is a group chat where students can discuss or ask questions around their subjects. Alongside, our website has a careers page, which contains forums relating to different careers students may be interested in such as engineering or medicine. Students can post about projects they want to work on with others, or help they need with any of their current projects.
How we built it
Our website is built using HTML and CSS and Javascript to handle our backend. To handle our data (messages, posts, avaliable subjects, etc...) we used Firebase and connected it to our website using Javascript. Each specific page (subjects, careers, and posts) was created dynamically by having a template HTML page and filling it in based on the search parameters of the link. So we would extract the search parameter (for example the post ID) and use that to lookup the post data in our database, then add html elements on the page to reflect that data (replies/comments, post title and content).
Challenges we ran into
The challenges we ran into was mainly inexperience, as most of our team had no experience in web development, and we all were not familiar with creating dynamic webpages. It was a steep learning curve for us all which resulted in a lot of crunch, which may have been helped if we had prepared a bit more. Apart from that we also found designing good HTML and CSS difficult, which resulted in a fair bit of jank.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The fact that we were able to actually complete our project and achieve what we set out to do is a big accomplishment to all of us especially considering our inexperience. Other than that we all gained a lot of experience and new knowledge which is always nice to have.
What we learned
We learnt a lot, especially about working as a team. Given the deadlines, it was hard at times to see whether or not we could actually make it. But we pushed through, and definitely understood how we might work as a team better next time (potentially). Preparation and experience are also valuable, seeing our struggles not having either.
What's next for StudySync
Maybe we could make it a real thing, but to be honest our project is probably not the most well made, but that's alright. If we get more experience, or we can work more confidently as a team this is a cool project that we would love to revisit.
Instructions
- Link to the theme video is below (youtube link)
- If you want to try out our website, you have to set up Firebase Firestore, and copy the config into src/firebase.config.js. After that you may have to install npm to run build. After that host the dist directory on a server (we used npm's serve command)
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