ZotPal

Struggle to be an academic weapon? Use ZotPal to grow your own academic weapon. A web app that incentivizes students to attend class by rewarding their pals with points to grow bigger and stronger.

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Inspiration

It's very common for students to skip their classes. Given the importance of education, we thought it would be beneficial to encourage students to attend class more and get the most out of their education.

What it does

This web app gives users a pet anteater that they can level up. In order to level up, the user must acquire enough points by going to class. The app verifies that the user went to class by comparing their current location with the locations of their inputted classes. With each level up, the pet anteater will grow larger and stronger.

How we built it

The online interface with built using Flask, HTML, and JavaScript. Google Sign-In was also integrated using OAuth. We stored and retrieved user data using SQL databases.

Challenges we ran into

Throughout the hackathon, we overcame obstacles in both development and teamwork. Almost every tech stack we used was brand new to us and with so many moving parts, it was difficult to stay on the same page while making our very first web app.

However, with patience, cooperation, and perseverance, we were able to quickly learn and apply new technologies to achieve a fully functional web app that can be used by anyone with internet access, all the while maintaining positive vibes.

What we learned

New technologies we used include SQL, Flask, HTML, JavaScript, OAuth, Github, Location APIs

What's next for ZotPal

In the future, we hope to improve the appearance and implement an online database. Instead of manually entering courses and their times we'd like to utilize the Peter Portal API to make the UI more enjoyable and convenient. We would also implement mobile functionality. It is also crucial for us to incentivize our users by adding more functionality to our points system. To make ZotPal more enjoyable we plan to add more ways to customize your pal along with features where users can interact with one another.

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