Book'd | Devpost

Created by Team Cicadas - Carlee Foster, Janelle Tam, Nicole Pardal, and Arunima Srivastav.

Inspiration

Successfully pursuing a college education requires diligence, passion, and self-discipline. Yet, the pandemic has hit us all with a huge hurdle: not only are we all isolated from one another, but it has also hindered our ability to focus on studying effectively and mindfully. Our solution: Book'd — a study partner finder to boost accountability and productivity.

What it does

Book’d is a social platform where students can connect with other university attendees to form study sessions. Users would create an account and input their university, major, and proficiency level in their speciality: beginner, intermediate, or advanced. From there, students can browse profiles to meet other students that share their major, and may then chat with them to form a group to study with. Once students have completed a study session via our integrated-chatting and video-calling interface (which we will implement in a later release), they can rate how their experience was with the group formed. This feedback system will give users an average rating, so that people know who and who not to study with during their time on Book'd.

How we built it

To create this service, the tools we utilized were Qoom, Bootstrap, and GitHub. The user interface for Book'd was designed using Qoom, a "web app development platform." Qoom was also used to incorporate a login/sign up system that would store user information in a database. The front-end of Book'd was created using the Bootstrap framework. This provider offered us with website templates, as well as their HTML and CSS code, so we didn't have to start from scratch. GitHub is a software development application that keeps track of project version control. We chose GitHub to keep our work in a repository in case we wished to roll back any features.

Challenges we ran into

We had to figure out how to integrate all the webpages each team member created together, work around a couple bugs with Qoom (ex: files disappearing), and continue to push everything to Github since we weren't working locally.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of learning how to utilize the tools used to create our project. Since we are beginners, many of these tools were new to us, so we had to learn as we continued conducting our project. One of the things we are most proud of is being able to utilize the Qoom database to store user information when it is inputted into the sign up page.

What we learned

We learned the syntax of HTML, CSS, and Javascript, employed the Bootstrap framework, and learned some basic data management to keep track of user and login information.

What's next for Book'd

We plan to continue adding to this project by further customizing the webpages to make them more sleek, adding an integrated-chatting interface & video call feature, incorporating location services, and using machine learning algorithms to display profiles that would most suit the user.