Inspiration
During high school, volunteering had a perception of "doing it just to get your hours" but we wanted to add some fun to it and encourage it to foster a community, so we decided to create this portal to achieve just that.
What it does
The site allows you to securely login and provides a personal portal with a dashboard where you can track your hours and additionally shows numerous real volunteering opportunities where you can view the positions with ease.
How we built it
Initially focusing on the backend, we used Python with BeautifulSoup, Selenium, and Flask to web scrape volunteering opportunities from a volunteering site. We then used Auth0 to integrate secure authentication for users to access their dashboard of volunteer hour information.
Challenges we ran into
One challenge was getting Auth0 to connect to the domain of our website. Another challenge was with our first experience web scraping for data, it was difficult to scrape from multiple sites and retrieve all the information in the same format, so we stuck to a single site. Lastly, formatting the site on the frontend was another challenge where we went through many designs trying to find the best layout for VoluntEasy.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Learning and integrating authentication using Auth0 to provide a secure user experience
- Web scraping accurate and specific information successfully
What we learned
As our first full-stack project, we learned how to integrate the frontend and backend to work seamlessly together and learned new frameworks, languages, databases, and APIs. Additionally, through the experience, we learned how to effectively collaborate on a full-stack scale project.
What's next for VoluntEasy
Some next steps for VoluntEasy is to allow organizations and users to add their own volunteering events to help foster connections with volunteers and organizations. Adding game elements like points to collect and receive prizes when you volunteer at events on the site will also provide incentive to volunteer more.
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