Team leader's Discord: phoen1x239#9739
Inspiration
The University of Florida has a vibrant student life and culture given the presence of hundreds of student organizations and strong membership in those organizations. Through personal experience, it is difficult for students to know when and where organizations are having their general body meetings (GBMs) without joining the social media accounts for specific clubs. As such, we chose to build a forum where any student can access specific clubs and automatically identify when and where their GBMs on campus are happening without the need to join social media accounts.
What it does
This website is a place to post about events from any club. It has a form that lets anyone upload event information for a specific club as well as a picture for its flyer. Clicking on events in the homepage will show another page with further details.
How we built it
We started with a pencil-on-paper plan of what the website would look like with a variety of potential features. Afterwards, we proceeded to create a small design mock-up on Figma, where we then began with creating our React app and making the basic layout of the home page. Over time, we would break the design down into components, and once we were able to load posts from a JavaScript object, we began to work on the backend program and figure out how to store the posts in a database.
Challenges we ran into
Certain challenges we ran into as a team were improper communication and personal experiences with the technologies we used. Communication on individual updates for the project could have been improved so that there would be no confusion on what each individual had to work on. Additionally, each member had varying levels of experiences with such technology, so learning certain technologies in a constrained time frame was difficult. It would have been better if there was a more experienced member on the team who could mentor others.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Each team member put in their hardest efforts to make this project work, especially in terms of learning. We were able to organize virtual calls and in-person meetings where we could collaborate on code development.
What we learned
From a technical standpoint, each of us learned web development skills and technologies that were applied to this project. We also learned how Figma can be used to design the interface of the site and how Sqlite can be used to store a database. From a non-technical standpoint, each of us learned vital collaboration and leadership skills necessary for a group to function.
What's next for Gator Space
Making the website more visually appealing is a good place to start improvements. This website can be improved to having good student accounts and appropriate authentication. We should also include tags for posts.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.