UTD Event Horizon

UTD students, especially underclassmen, can be overwhelmed with the amount of events student organizations offer. Our website creates a great user experience to make this information easy to digest.

Comment

Please note our team plans to present in person. The short demo video is there to give a better understanding of how the website works, not as a finalized presentation of the product.

Inspiration

As our team is composed of UTD Sophomores (and one freshman) we sought to tackle the problems we had experienced as students over our stay. We found the built-in "Events" tab in the official UTD app to be clunky, not-user friendly, and wieldy. We stepped out to create a website that creates a far better user experience.

What it does

Student organizations (or anyone with special access) can create events that are added to a list as well as a virtual calendar. They can give this event a title, a date and time, a location, a description, an image, and predefined tags (such as food, social, etc.). Students can then view the website and see this information all laid out for them. In addition, we included the Concept3D map of the university's campus. This allows students to quickly look up the location of events that they are interested in, without leaving the webpage.

How we built it

Event Horizon runs mainly on HTML and JavaScript. The Concept3D map is an applet included on the page.

Challenges we ran into

  • None of us were very well versed in JavaScript or HTML at the start of the event. Nevertheless, our team was able to learn it quickly and use other programming concepts to create this product.
  • The "tags" function was difficult to implement, but our team was able to solve this issue by using nested arrays.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Our team's ingenuity to solve problems, even though some of us had little to no programming experience.
  • We believe our system's UI is aesthetically pleasing, which was one of our biggest issues with the current system in place.

What we learned

  • Our team became far more comfortable with using arrays as a system of data storage, which was not something our team had done much of before.
  • Our team also gained vast amounts of experience with new programming languages.

What's next for UTD Event Horizon

  • We were unable to get a website to host the project, so it only works locally. Our first mission is to connect it to a network so all Comets can get the same information as soon as it's available.
  • The ability to search for events via tags, and possibly event creators can add their own.
  • Better integration with Concept3D that allows people to find event locations by simply clicking on them.
  • Mobile app integration so Comets can take this information wherever they may go.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates