Inspiration
As all college students know, having study buddies in a class can make all the difference in how difficult a class be. Studying with friends, collaborating on assignments, and knowing there are people procrastinating just as much as you are, can make a class much more enjoyable.
However, since the pandemic, meeting new people in classes has become very difficult. Because most classes record and broadcast lectures, many people don't go to class anymore, making it much harder to build relationships with students. That's why we're building GTStudyBuddy - to help you find your study buddies for every semester.
What it does
First, GTStudyBuddy allows you to make an account using your email. After making your account you can edit your profile and add details such as your phone number, the semester you started at Georgia Tech, and clubs/organizations you are involved in. Then, you can add your courses for the semester by course reference number. In addition, there is a list of courses provided for the semester you choose. After adding your courses, GTStudyBuddy finds other students who are in the same classes and you can message them through the app.
How we built it
As iOS club is committed to serving students with no prior experience, we spent the first couple weeks learning the fundamentals of iOS app development with SwiftUI and interacting with the backend framework Firebase. We compartamentalized parts of the app into small features with team members collaborating to complete tickets. The app authentication is done using FirebaseAuth, user and course data is stored in Firestore, and messages are implemented using Firebase Realtime Database. We retrieved course information such as CRN, course names, and descriptions with the GT Scheduler API. Lastly, the UI was all done with SwiftUI.
What we learned
In building this app, we learned a lot. Integrating a SwiftUI app with Firebase was something that provided us with a lot of experience in managing both a frontend and backend and hosting our data. It was also a huge benefit working on such a project with a team, utilizing Github for collaboration and project management. Lastly, it was a great introduction to designing a product for a large community, thinking for the user, etc.
What's next for GTStudyBuddy
After developing the core functionality for GTStudyBuddy, we plan to continue improving the user experience by implementing nice-to-have features like being able to directly add buddies from a contact list, create group chats among several individuals with shared classes, enabling push notifications directly to the user's device, etc. In the near future, we hope to roll out the GTStudyBuddy application to Georgia Tech's campus to get the product into students' hands and receive useful feedback. If successful, GTStudyBuddy could be broadened to many more universities around the country and continue connecting students, one buddy at a time!
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