Where Space

Home Page
Spaces Page
Book Space Modal
Peers Page
Bookings Page
Events Page
Page for collaboration in Event
Login Page

Inspiration

What’s the most valuable thing in the world? People usually say it's time. Today, our invention is going to save your time and also boost your productivity in two aspects, allowing you to focus on what’s actually important to you and thus increasing your productivity.

As students, we all have experienced a time of suffering from unsatisfactory workspaces. It could be that your dorm is too small to have a table for studying; it could be that you are more productive in a quiet environment but your surroundings are usually noisy. From our research, we made this app to be a new and easier solution to this pain point.
As learners, we all know the journey from ignorance to enlightenment is arduous when walked alone. Having peers learning together to get through the process can really help. Our platform fosters a community of learners, enabling users to connect with peers sharing similar educational objectives.
For workspace providers, Cafe, study cubes, and other educational venues can find a unique opportunity to showcase their spaces and even profit by integrating with our app (when future support of this feature is provided). The rating feature also helps the owners make their spaces more compelling to learners. The app thus creates the maximum benefits for both parties and is likely to be financially sustainable.

What it does

Workspace Discovery and Reservation: To learners, the app provides a convenient way to know the workspaces around you, allows you to find workspaces suitable for you, and lets you book the places directly. Whether you want a cafe with background noise, a quiet library, or a collaboration space for team meetings, we have options for you, saving your time from going from one place to another just to know the right place to work in. For example, you might live near Kings Cross station where there is heavy traffic, or there is construction work going on next to your place. You can search for quiet spaces near you in the app and make a booking directly. Thus, you save your time and focus on the things that actually matter to you!

Community Learning and Networking: The app also provides a convenient way to meet peers who want to work on the same learning goal. This is because the app provides a convenient way to find people who are working on the same goal and allows them to form learning groups for either virtual or in-person learning events, providing an environment for discussion and learning toward the same goals. We believe that ideas are shared when people learn together. You can meet senior people who have more profound knowledge, peers at a similar level as you, or juniors who might be less experienced. For example, You may also meet a student just like you who is working on the same subject. Sharing what each of us know helps to speed up the learning process and cuts down the corners of the unknown. You may also meet a researcher in AI who also wants to learn software engineering. Through your exchanges, you are very likely to know what’s happening in the API field and knowledge about AI. However, if you were going to learn those AI knowledge and facts, it may take you several hours to watch YouTube videos or go through books. It’s also possible you might meet a designer who wants to learn how to build a web app together. While you can share your engineering and web-building skills, they can share their design experience and knowledge. Even though the knowledge does not help you learn software engineering, it can come in handy in many other ways.

How we built it

Considering we want to cover as much audience as possible, we decided to make a web app that can be used on almost every platform and adapted to native experience easily. Our web app has two parts: the frontend for the user interfaces, and the backend for business logic. The frontend is built using NEXT.js and Material UI. The backend is built with Django, supporting Restful API and custom APIs over WebSockets. We started with brainstorming ideas and prototyping user interfaces and interaction flows. Once the designs were pinned down, three of us worked on the frontend and the other one worked on the backend.

Challenges we ran into

Because of our ambitious goals, our user-interaction flow is quite complicated. This requires dedicated care of state management in the frontend and the backend. Managing tasks in the team was a challenge we faced in the very beginning that we immediately fixed by enhancing communication among the members, and it was amazing that we noticed it early on in the first hour! All of us had worked on web development frameworks like React, Angular etc. but Next JS was new to all of us and it was challenging but eventually very enriching as we could now take away a new skill by applying it onto a task.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We made a whole working web app in under 20 hours, for an idea that was freshly discussed and sketched. The main feature in the app that we are really proud of is in the Event Collaboration page where various users who are participating in an event have a live chat along and task list that updates for all users automatically when changed by one!! This was great, and was an achievement for us! Other than this, this application works based on zoom on the map, and filtering for locations happens based on the map area being looked at.

What we learned

Team work, How fun it is to laugh together like maniacs while being sleep deprived at 5 AM and how to center a div :)

What's next for Where Space

As per the business perspective, we aim to reach out to various businesses like cafes, libraries, bars etc. to join the platform for users to seek them to study/work in. The application can also be advertised in universities for students to sign in and grow a large network for peers who shall collaborate together.

As per the development perspective, we aim to enhance a lot of features like better filtering, richer media to be sent in event collaboration page, and maybe also add a lot of settings for users. This app has a lot of potential to grow as a new idea, and can further scale as the peer and space network grows!