Inspiration
The inspiration for creating EduCycler stemmed from an understanding of the financial challenges faced by university students. Textbooks are expensive and often unused after the semester, forever lying in some corner of a room. EduCycler was born out of a desire to empower students to alleviate this financial strain, facilitating a platform where they could easily buy and sell textbooks within their academic community.
What it does
Our website provides an easy platform for students to sell and buy used textbooks. By allowing users to filter listings by university and course, EduCycler aims to make textbook trading a more efficient, affordable, and environmentally sustainable experience for college students.
How we built it
EduCycler was created using React. We initially designed the whole website in Figma. This allowed us to optimize our website style, functionality, and layout. We then spent time creating our design in Figma. Throughout this process, GitHub was used for version control.
Challenges we ran into
As beginners to React, we had a significant challenge in learning how to use the framework. We spent extra hours on tutorials, documentation, and practical exercises. We sought help from mentors, learned collaboratively, and persisted when hitting bugs. We had also planned to use Convex for our backend development. However, we lost a team member partway through the hackathon and had to reevaluate our plan. We overcame this by focusing on creating a working front-end site and implementing features modularly to ensure we had a working product at the end of the hackathon.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
One accomplishment we are proud of is our quick turnaround time when we realized our project would be able to be implemented as we originally intended. Our remaining team members efficiently communicated and got to work.
What we learned
Through this dedication and commitment to learning, we successfully developed EduCycler, gaining valuable experience in React development along the way.
What's next for EduCycler
We hope to continue working on this project after the hackathon. We intend to implement a backend database that allows users to create accounts and manage their listings and purchases. Adding an in-built payment system and seller-buyer chat are other primary goals we have. These would allow our website to cover the full textbook resale process, from adding lists to successfully purchasing and picking up the textbooks.
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