Inspiration
Since decisions have recently come out for the class of 2026, we decided to make a dorm questionnaire for new students in order to help them decide which dorm to room in. When we were new students, information about the characteristics of each dorm was scattered all over the place. This questionnaire hopefully will send new students in the right direction by giving them a preliminary suggestion for which dorm will suit their needs.
What it does
The UIUC New Student Dorm Questionnaire is a web app that gives the user a brief set of questions about their preferences. Once the user is finished answering these questions, they are shown the best matching UIUC dorm (out of 5 possible options) for them based on what they responded with.
How we built it
The website was built using React.JS, a frontend JavaScript library for building user interfaces. Some CSS was also used to configure the formatting.
Challenges we ran into
One issue we ran into during development was that the questionnaire would move forward even if the user did not select any option. This was fixed by checking if the response value was not any of the 5 options available and if so, displaying a red error message below the submit button and denying the user from moving forward.
Another issue we ran into was that the 5 response buttons did not reset in between questions. To solve this, we made a simple helper method that looped through the buttons and reset their states.
Another issue was that the images of the dorms in the results screen were not uniformly scaled. We solved this by adding to the CSS that the width of every image should be 25 rem, which made sure it was standardized across all devices.
A big challenge we ran into was getting the point system to work as expected. Since JavaScript is a language that we have little to no experience in, the syntax and methods were something we had to get used to in order to make the point system.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
One accomplishment we are proud of is how we were able to accomplish what we envisioned. We were also able to create a well-functioning web app with no bugs in the final product despite it being everybody's first time doing web development.
What we learned
One thing we learned was how to debug. We learned to use breakpoints to find places where there might be an error in the code. We also picked up on a lot of the JavaScript syntax and how to set up React.
What's next for UIUC New Student Dorm Questionnaire
The next step for the UIUC New Student Dorm Questionnaire is to move the web app from the local host to a public web host. This will make it so that new students will actually have access to it. We have plans to use vercel or some other web host in order to accomplish this.
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