Inspiration After moving to Montreal, our own experience having difficulty finding people to study with before midterm, especially since lectures do not allow for meaningful connections with people.
What it is supposed to do: It is rudimentary website featuring different courses. On each page, one can log the location and time they would like to study (we call that log a "beacon"). Other students will see that beacon and reply to it. It allows for a more structured study planning than Facebook, and it encourages more off-line connections.
How we built it: Spending hours and hours reading about Django, which we didn't actually have to use. Learning SQLite from scratch. We did a lot of conceptual planning in order to construct an ordered project.
Challenges I ran into: We ran into many challenges, such as learning the basics of Django after we chose that we would create a website and not a mobile app. None of us knew how to code a website or to create a database in the beginning. We also had to think on how the project could be implemented on a website.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of:
What I learned: We all progressed in programming (HTML, python, the implementation of Django, SQL).
What's next for The Student Beacon: The student beacon is a website with a very large scope. In the future, Student Beacon will be an app, to make it more accessible on the go. It will also include more universities, to help more students. It will also include more beacon types, such as students looking for a tutor. It will also have an option to create a follow up meeting that will appear exclusively for members who came to the first. The Student Beacon is an ambitious project that has the scope to helps thousands of students in their daily lives.
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