ToborFairy

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Our ToborFairy asset. He flutters if you click on him!
What our extension looks like when viewed from the Google Chrome extensions page.
Our extension pop-up shown in Google Calendar. Shows events that a) are happening this week and b) have no conflicts

Inspiration

Even as a freshman when everything on campus is unfamiliar, the Tobors wandering around soon become familiar sights. Inspired by WEHack's theme, we combined them with the most whimsical and well-known guides of any fantasy world- fairies - to create a fun, engineering-meets-fantasy mascot.

What it does

ToborFairy is a Google Chrome extension that parses through the information in your Google Calendar (after asking for permission, of course!). Once it finds a time slot when you're free, it suggests a relevant event for you to go to, whether it be a kickoff, a workshop, or just a social to chill and relax. Building your network is one of the most important skills to have, and one of the best ways to do so is to join a school organization. ToborFairy aims to be that gentle push that freshman need to get involved on campus and start making those meaningful connections.

How we built it

We built this Google Chrome extension using HTML, CSS, and Javascript, taking advantage of Google Chrome's built-in content scripts to insert ToborFairy into the page, regardless of what else might be displayed on the screen. Our code integrates the Google Calendar API to manage engineering students' club events. It retrieves and processes events from the student’s calendar, algorithmically parsing through all the events in a student's calendar to identify times a student is free. From there, we parse through our database of club events and compare it to when a student is free and display it in the extension. Finally, we can allow the student to automatically add their preferred club events to their Google Calendar by sending a post request to the API.

Challenges we ran into

Suprisingly enough, a major challenge was simply figuring out what we wanted to create. We brainstormed and tossed ideas at each other for several hours, and almost started coding a different project at one point. After asking for input from the L3Harris representatives and brainstorming a little more, we finally decided on ToborFairy, five hours into the hackathon.

Another main challenge that we ran into is that all of us were working with technologies that we didn't have much experience in. Most of us have never made a Chrome extension before or even coded in web programming languages like HTML and JavaScript.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite not having much experience in the tech stack that we chose, we were able to develop a fully functional prototype in less than 24 hours, which is one major accomplishment we're proud of.

What we learned

In the past 24 hours, we've learned how to develop a Google Chrome extension popup in HTML and CSS, utilize the Google Calendar API to parse through calendar events, compare with our database, and create new Google calendar events, and use built-in content scripts to inject our own HTML on top of websites. We've also made good use of our Git skills as we used multiple branches to merge and update each other's code.

What's next for ToborFairy

In the future, we hope to have a separate web app where campus org officers can input their club events into our database. There's no one place where engineering club events are stored, and their information is often scattered across Discord announcements, Instagram posts, or the Comet Calendar. We hope to create one united place for new engineering students to find events, but we came to the conclusion that for the sake of this hackathon, we had no choice but to manually create our own database of club events.