UniBot

UniBot allows high school students to get in connect and interact with alumni and current university students to learn more about a wide range of programs. UniBots is definitely the way to go!

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Inspiration

We all felt that it is quite a difficult decision to make about choosing your career in your grade 12 year. There's not enough guidance provided to students to completely clarify which program or career choice is best for them and so students often try to search on websites like reddit or even private message strangers on social media in hopes of getting helpful feedback. From this, we decided to create our web app, UniBot, which is solely dedicated to senior high school students. Through these websites, students can wish to live chat with alumni or current uni students or even registered profs and receive the best feedback possible. Not everyone gets the chance to attend university fairs or open houses, so this application could replace that missed opportunity while still providing beneficial feedback. After all, it's your future career we are talking about!

What it does

What our web app, UniBot, does is that it allows clients (high school students) and to sign up and browse through the website. Inside, the student can choose the university they are interested in and filter further by choosing their program of interest. Once they have chosen their university and program, they will be able to see a list of alumni, profs or current university students in the specific program at the chosen university and get a chance to have a live one on one or a group chat with them. This way, students can receive the best feedback as possible!

How we built it

We built this web application using HTML/CSS/Bootstrap for front end designing and layout of the widgets and JavaScript to make the application interactive. To route between different pages, we used the Flask framework in the backend. Essentially, there's two sides to this application: one one end, high school students sign up and login into the website and request for a live chat when available and on the other side, current university students or alumni can log in and accept the requests sent by students and commence the chat! To store the username data, we used SQLite3.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many challenges. For example this was our first time using Jquery so we had to read some documentation to debug the code. Furthermore, one small challenge we ran into was sharing code with one another. We decided not to use any version control system so at one point it became slightly difficult to merge our code together, but in the end we were successfully able to do it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The largest accomplishment for us is to be able to create an app which has the potential to help thousands of future students in clarifying their goals and set them on the correct pathway! Aside from that, this was a great learning opportunity and we were able to gain a good deal of full stack development knowledge, and that itself is something we are proud of.

What we learned

The most important non-technical skill we learned was perseverance because we came across many challenges during this project and it taught us to never give up. In terms of technical skills, we learned a lot about the Flask framework and the SQLite3 database. Furthermore, we also learned about backend development because going into the hackathon most of us only had previous experience coding in HTML and CSS.

What's next for UniBot

We are planning on expanding the database to include more universities and programs. We also want to further increase traffic on the website and increase the number of feedback students from certain programs provide. In the future, we would like to expand who is able to mentor secondary school students to professors. This would allow students to receive professional advice from those who have been in their respective fields for decades. Lastly, we want to develop an in-built networking tool on our website such as voice and video chat options. We look forward to further working on this project!

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