YorkU-Social

An app for students to connect and explore the campus organisations

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Inspiration

We as a team felt a shared disappointment with YUconnect. The official website seems to be barren with latest event postings being from 10 years ago. As a result, the only way to be aware of and know about various events happening is by virtue of the posters on the walls of Vari Hall, YU Lanes, ACW, etc.

Also, there have been numerous times when we wanted to grab some food from the restaurants in the campus during late evening lectures but sadly near the closing hours of these restaurants, we were denied service, which is totally understood as per the policies, however, at the same time, we have witnessed left over food being thrown into garbage right Infront of our eyes. We, as a team decided to address these two issues and recreate a mobile application, YU-Social.

What it does

YU-Social allows users (students, club admins and campus restaurant managers) to create a profile and perform the following tasks:

1) Students - every york student would get an easy access to club catalogue being run in the university, get updated about the events being organized and register for them, browse through the york cafeteria restaurants to know about the 'closing-deals', get a reminder for all the events they signed up for, all at one place. Keeping in mind the recent attacks at TTC and campus, we are also planning to add a feature called 'buddy-commute program' through which students can find their fellow peers travelling to the same subway/bus station at the same time so that they can form a group and feel safe to commute back home after late evening lectures.

2) Club Admins - club presidents can easily update their contact or general information through the application and also post about the events being organized by them and reach a wider audience without the need of putting up posters on random locations at campus.

3) Restaurant Managers - apart from the fact that the list of restaurants would be available at one place along with their respective locations and service hours, we also added a feature where they can mark and publish if they would be doing any 'closing-deals', which upon discussion with all the restaurants would allow the to sell the leftovers at a discounted rate rather than throwing them straight into the garbage. This would in-fact, over time, help reduce waste and get the restaurants some profit at the same time.

How we built it

Although, at this time, we do not have a completely functional application, we used Figma to create the design prototype and establish connections, REACT NATIVE along with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build the few parts of the web-app that we currently have. For the application to be functional, we would also need a database connection that would store all the login, event, restaurant and club information. We would also need a Scrapping API to get all the club data from the existing YUconnect website.

Challenges we ran into

Since, we were not really proficient in programming, it took us quite some time to figure out how to build the components. As a result we spent a lot of time studying relevant material first and then discussing and implementing it, thus, we were unable to create a majority of our web pages and establish connection with the databases.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One thing that we are proud of is that this solution would improve the campus social life, provide a sense of security for students travelling late at night and help with waste reduction at the same time. Also, to say that we learnt a lot about working together for a coding project, would be an understatement.

What we learned

Since this was a first hackathon for everybody present in the group, we learnt how to brainstorm ideas as a team as we came up with about 7 to 8 different ideas. We learnt about the various processes and stages it takes for an application to be built right from designing the prototype to implementing it. We definitely did learn a lot about the languages and developing tools that we used, as we were not proficient in that earlier. But, now we do have some confidence gained to start building applications from scratch.

What's next for YorkU-Social

As mentioned earlier, our next step would be to implement and add the feature of 'buddy-commute program' as it is vital for everybody coming to campus now a days. This also includes being able to implement and code all of our webpages along with the database in the coming future.

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