UnityU

Inspiration

We were inspired by the challenges faced by students, administrators, and everyone in between where the lack of easily accessible resource pools became very evident: especially in a post-COVID world. As students ourselves, we recognize the importance of fostering meaningful connections and with the rise of technology comes a fall in personal interactions. Our goal is to address this gap by creating a platform that serves as a community hub, allowing individuals to seamlessly intermix their skill sets and interests and establish valuable connections.

What it does

UnityU is a platform where students and administration of a university have the opportunity to come together and embrace their skills and interests in a community-style forum. This platform is the entry step to fostering real life connections within communities.

How we built it

In the initial phase of our project, we crafted a well-thought-out user interface for our website. This involved meticulous planning of various pages, including the placement and functionality of buttons and links. Moving forward, our focus shifted to frontend development, where we harnessed the power of HTML and CSS to bring our designs to life with visually appealing and responsive layouts. As we delved into the backend development, JavaScript became our programming language of choice. This language allowed us to navigate through databases efficiently, tailoring the user experience by highlighting specific interests based on individual user data.

Challenges we ran into

A major challenge we ran into was in the creation of the platform itself. We had little to no experiencing creating a website, so manually learning languages like HTML and meshing it with our Python coding concepts proved to be a large hurdle for us. Also, as we started off with high priority on the frontend code, we were left with the entirety of the convoluting backend code for the second half of the event. This meant we would encounter many of our coding issues very late in the game, leaving us with little time to debug.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the frontend aspects of our development. We spent a lot of time focusing on the aesthetics of the platform by hand crafting all the logos and color schemes. We are also proud of the website concept in and of itself. As it is a very applicable concept for our lives, we believe there is great real-world potential for UnityU.

What we learned

We learned a lot about the background of what it takes to create a website. We learned how to utilize different languages to different aspects of our code, for example frontend versus backend. Also how to collaborate and expand interpersonal and technical skills not only in a physical group setting, but also in a group coding space using GitLab.

What's next for UnityU

UnityU hopes to create a more broad and diverse range of interests as we know there are lots of places to expand on to adhere to everyones skillsets. Also, we hope to eventually create an in-site messaging service to more readily create these meaningful connections.