Inspiration
As both an officer of an organization and a regular college student, I am well aware of the gap in communication between student-run organizations and students.
Mostly at the beginning of every semester and throughout, hundreds of student organizations try to recruit motivated and involved students into their clubs. However, with so many trying to achieve the same objective, it creates confusion and disorganization among students.
What it does
Our application will be able to create a platform that connects students to internal and external events, that occur on or near campus to enhance the student experience - professionally, technically and socially.
How we built it
We built this web-based, cross-platform application using an HTML and CSS backbone. We spent the majority of our time creating the front-end user interface that students and sponsors would view when using the application. After we were satisfied with the overall graphic design on the app, we used MySQL and Python to create a basic database to store the metadata to simulate the program used by a few users.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenge we encountered was the lack of prior programming experience with almost all of the software tools used throughout the weekend. Two out of the four members on the team had no prior experience with HTML and CSS. Thus, it was a challenge to accomplish our task given our limited knowledge foundation.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are most proud that we have a presentable project to demo. Most of us entered the weekend expecting to just learn a lot of information and attempt to tackle a project with no notions of completing one. Given our collective experience levels, we are proud of our perseverance to learn a sufficient amount of HTML and CSS to create our app even enduring the obstacles of time and other frustrations.
What we learned
We learned that ample testing time is a requirement to create a presentable project. Of course, we learned more about the general framework and data control of websites. Most importantly, we learned that it is important to listen to another and seek advice from mentors frequently. The motto for this weekend was the "Fail fast and fail often." The mentors and company representatives were a great resource when tackling our project.
What's next for You Matter, We Connect
Next, we plan to improve on our design to potentially scale its capability to be used one day at our University.
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