Inspiration
During shopping period, Brown students are in a rush to finalize their class schedules. Our team noticed that there is an incredulous amount of disorganized requests for course swaps through platforms like EdStem, Canvas, Sidechat, Instagram group chats, etc. We saw this inefficiency and realized there was no centralized way for students to connect and swap classes easily. Thus, we created Swap @ Brown, a simple, streamlined, platform to facilitate class swaps during the shopping period. Our goal is to 1) reduce stress 2) save time and 3) ensure students can most efficiently create schedules that is best suited to them.
What it does
Swap @ Brown is a platform that helps Brown students find and exchange class spots during the first two weeks of the semester. Users can post the classes they want to swap out of and search for available swaps posted by other students. The classes pop up as cards that are easily clickable, and students can exchange classes this way!
How we built it
We built the initial MongoDB database using webscraping with Puppeteer and post processing with Regex. We connected this with our backend using Node.js and extracted this information to display on our frontend website. With the swap information, we also used the same process with Node.js and MongoDB. We built Swap @ Brown using a REST API with a Node.js backend to handle requests efficiently. For our database, we used MongoDB. On the front end, we used HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create an intuitive, arcade-themed, and user-friendly interface for students to browse and request swaps.
Challenges we ran into
We had some issues connecting to the MongoDB database on the cloud, but we resolved those.
What we learned
What's next for Swap@Brown
We plan to integrate this further into the Brown community, inviting Courses @ Brown. We also plan to streamline this exchange process further with automation of communication between students.
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