TheStudyMap

Inspiration

There's many college students that share similar goals & interests with one another, but often go without crossing paths during their college careers. It could be studying for classes, research, community service, campus life, or school events. Our goal is to connect college students interested in working together to host and attend study sessions, research, and school events on campus.

What it does

Our App is designed to display nearby study sessions/research/events/club meetings at your college campus that you can contribute to or attend in real time. In order to view our map of nearby happening, all that is required is that users register with an Edu email. Once a student has registered, they will be able to see posted events from active users and join them if it's something they would like to be a part of. Every event post has information such as topic(s) being discussed, location, time and place, and any other descriptive details. If someone doesn't find something they like, they can create their own event posting on campus and make it visible to other students on campus.

How we built it

Our Application was developed using Android Studio.

Challenges we ran into

Our initial plan was to design a web site and an android application, but as a result of the time restrictions, we decided to stick with just the android application. The first challenge we wanted to solve was to keep students, staff, and faculty association with a university as our user population in order to assure our users that this Application is a reliable networking source. Another challenge we ran into was integrating the Google maps api into our project, and making it word with our event posting feature. We were able to solve this issue with research and a lot of trial and error. Our last main issue was how to make event postings reliable to people who wish to attend or contribute. As a solution, we are still working on implementing a credibility system where users can be rated based on their contributions to their own or other's events.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Coming in to HackTx, we knew that building an Application on this scale would be a challenge. Even though we had three first-timers in our group of four, we were able to finish our prototype. We have a long way to go, but it's an accomplishment nevertheless.

What we learned

Our team gained more experience in terms of working with user login and registration, API implementation, and GUI Design.

What's next for TheStudyMap

Future features that we want to integrate are a note storing and sharing system as well as a sub messaging platform and friend list tracker. Lastly, we will also be working on optimization for our current prototype.