HackUTD-VI | Devpost

The user authentication page.
Home screen - the Google Maps API directly opens at UTD
The Add Event page where the user can create an event from.
The calendar interface where the user views all of their upcoming events.

Inspiration

We were inspired by Comet Calendar since it is really useful in concept, as it brings all the events and activities to one spot for us to browse. The problem? It's not very user-friendly. With a single-scroll web-based UI, Comet Calendar just wasn't something that was optimized for students to make the most of it. That's where we come in - Comet Events.

Comet Events is a crowd-source app that allows UTD students to post events such as club/organization meetings, social events, free food around campus and so on. Our main goal with the app was a improvise on the UTD's Comet Calendar, that provides students with a list of, sometimes, outdated events in a hard-to-navigate list view. Our app makes this process much more fluid for the students by giving them a map view and allows them to contribute by letting them post events that they think are worth sharing.

What it does

We are an app dedicated to keeping up with both the Comet Calendar and the events that students want to follow to make sure both Orgs and students can make the best of their student lives.

How we built it

We used Android Studio to create the App and tested it on a Samsung S10+. We used Firebase authentication to log in users and Firestore to save user-specific data such as events they are interested in and upcoming events. We finally used Alexa Skills to integrate our calendar feature with a hands-free voice-recognition system to help students keep up with everything.

Challenges we ran into

The Alexa skills were particularly difficult to authenticate as a part of the app. We also had issues with implementing the firestore database in our app. But we managed to overcome both challenges to create our final product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to succesfully create an Alexa skill that reads directly from a cloud database that the user inputs their UTD calendar and other event information to.

What we learned

We were unfamiliar with many of the technologies that we worked with, but enjoyed learning and figuring them out. Particularly, the Alexa skills and Android Studio.