Inspiration
After brainstorming, we came up with The Hub, a web application for students that collates information from different sources together whether that be course information, assignment deadlines or society events into one platform to support students getting a comprehensive and simplified view of their university life and commitments.
From our first year, we typically found that we would have to search different platforms and webpages for different pieces of information. For example, EIE at Imperial uses Teams, Canvas, Panopto and Edstem to upload lecture recordings, submit courseworks/project work and discuss with coursemates. On top of that, society information was kept largely separate, with Instagram being the most reliable source to get any updates about events going on. This was not only very overwhelming, but it also felt that we would essentially play an endless game of catch up with something always being missed until the last minute. This is why we wanted to create an application that enables students to easily access and navigate through to identify any clashes in committments and the essentials they need to do well in their course.
What it does
The Hub is a student-focused web application designed to bring together all the information students usually have to track across different platforms in one place. It helps students view their course modules and assessment details, keep up with assignments and deadlines, explore society events and updates, and see everything in a single calendar so they can spot clashes and manage their commitments more easily. In short, it gives students a clearer, simpler overview of their academic and extracurricular life, reducing the stress of switching between multiple apps and websites.
How we built it
I (Irede) am currently working on a website that was built with Go so I thought it would be good to build the frontend using this language as it allows templates to be created and reused across multiple pages - which is a convenient way to avoid code duplication. Afterwards it was multiple prompting session between me and GitHub copilot to refine the styling (CSS), add different functionality (Javascript) and overall refinement. Zara was meanwhile working on the backend in Python to set up our database of fake users and then integrating the python and javascript functionality together to get a working website.
Challenges we ran into
Time and scale of what we wanted to achieve. It was a lot of work to complete between two people.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I think we did manage to do and learn a lot over the past 24 hours. We were also very resilient until the end.
What we learned
a) No more working in the final hour of anything b) Go is a pretty convenient language
What's next for The Hub
Mainly tweaking little things that we couldn't get to work in the hackathon - like implementing the Google API and then scaling it up to contain more universities and more courses.
