Inspiration

Creating study groups is proven to be beneficial to students' success. Unfortunately, sometimes it can be hard to find the right people to study with. Winter Study Buddies is designed to help you find fellow students in your classes.

What it does

Winter Study Buddies allows users to create postings that use GPS coordinates to be accessible only to other users nearby. This creates a system in which students can create posts within their classrooms asking relevant questions to their classmates. After a student posts a question, it creates an open message board for other students to discuss.

How we built it

Our back end is a Redis database, with an API written in Python for the app to access it. The app itself is written for Android using Android Studio and Java.

Challenges we ran into

Python Data Types Because Python uses implicit typing, we ran into some problems where data would be retrieved as a different type from what is was initially stored as. Fortunately, because it was stored as a string version of itself, we were able to find a library that would convert the strings back to the data types.

Android Location Services Because all postings within the app are tied to a location, the android app needs to retrieve the users location before it can display and create postings. While we did not have the time to create a true fix for this, we did create loading indicators to let the users know that the app is thinking.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of creating an entire application and building it from scratch over the course of the first 24 hours of the hackathon.

What we learned

We learned about the importance of picking good technologies. While Python is a great language with a lot to offer, it was not a great choice for our backend and we ran into a lot of problems because of it.

What's next for Winter-Study-Buddies

Going forward, there are a few things we would like to do. First, we want to rewrite the backend in a different language. We also need to improve the way the app handles location to try to make it more accurate and to reduce the amount of time the app spends searching for its location before loading data. We also would implement push notifications in the app for when people send messages and look into ways for improving communication within the app.