USL - University Student Life!

USL is a fun, interactive app for university students to connect with peers and stay up to date with clubs, activities and events in their school.

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Being a university student during the pandemic is very difficult. Not being able to connect with peers, run study sessions with friends and experience university life can be challenging and demotivating. With no present implementation of a specific data base that allows students to meet people in their classes and be automatically put into group chats, we were inspired to create our own.

Our app allows students to easily setup a personalized profile (school specific) to connect with fellow classmates, be automatically put into class group chats via schedule upload and be able to browse clubs and events specific to their school. This app is a great way for students to connect with others and stay on track of activities happening in their school community.

We built this app using an open-source mobile application framework called React Native and a real-time, cloud hosted database called Firebase. We outlined the GUI with the app using flow diagrams and implemented an application design that could be used by students via mobile. To target a wide range of users, we made sure to implement an app that could be used on android and IOS.

Being new to this form of mobile development, we faced many challenges creating this app. The first challenge we faced was using GitHub. Although being familiar to the platform, we were unsure how to use git commands to work on the project simultaneously. However, we were quick to learn the required commands to collaborate and deliver the app on GitHub. Another challenge we faced was nested navigation within the software. Since our project highly relied on a real-time database, we also encountered difficulties with implementing the data base framework into our implementation.

An accomplishment we are proud of is learning a plethora of different frameworks and how to implement them. We are also proud of being able to learn, design and code a project that can potentially help current and future university students across Ontario enhance their university lifestyles.

We learned many things implementing this project. Through this project we learned about version control and collaborative coding through Git Hub commands. Using Firebase, we learned how to handle changing data and multiple authentications. We were also able to learn how to use JavaScript fundamentals as a library to build GUI via React Native. Overall, we were able to learn how to create an android and IOS application from scratch.

What's next for USL- University Student Life!

We hope to further our expertise with the various platforms used creating this project and be able to create a fully functioning version. We hope to be able to help students across the province through this application.

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