Unimart

Inspiration

CalPoly Pomona's instant access system for textbooks is cheaper than buying all the textbooks necessary for a semester of classes, but it's expensive at $250. Also, many students bought textbooks and don't use them anymore.

What it does

Our website connects students who need school supplies, and students who don't use their school supplies anymore. It allows for students to find other students nearby, and communicate with them to circulate school necessities. We have a live chat so users can directly contact sellers through our website.

How we built it

We used Claude to create our front end in react. We then created the framework for our backend and model classes. Using this, we used Claude to populate database methods. We used Docker to run a MongoDB server locally and connected it to our backend.

Challenges we ran into

None of us had previous experience using Node, Claude, or MongoDB, so learning new framework for web development was difficult. We ran into trouble deploying our website. We originally tried on Docker, then tried on Vercel but were ultimately unable to finish deploying within the given timeframe.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating functioning database and having it interact with the server, facilitating communication between our frontend and backend, and our UI were big accomplishments for us.

What we learned

We learned the structure of, and how to implement web applications. We gained experience using Docker to run servers, and how to prompt Claude to create front/backend elements.