Study Crawl | Devpost

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Inspiration

"Study Crawl" was inspired by our own experiences as university students. In such a large community, it’s always difficult to find peers to study with or discuss course materials together. This can make academic life feel isolating at times. With "Study Crawl," we wanted to bridge that gap by creating a space where students can easily connect, form study groups, and work together. Our goal is to help foster collaboration and build a sense of belonging, making studying a more interactive and rewarding experience.

What it does

"Study Crawl" is a web app designed to help students find and join study groups with their classmates. It shows available campus buildings and study spaces for each course, so users can easily head to the right location and join in. By helping students connect with each other, the app promotes collaboration, builds community, and encourages a sense of belonging, perfectly in line with the challenge we set out to tackle.

How we built it

We built "Study Crawl" using Next.js for its dynamic and responsive interface, which allowed us to create an intuitive user experience. On the backend, we used Express.js to handle the app’s functionality and connect with a MongoDB database, which stores all the information about users and study groups. This combination of tools allowed us to create a reliable, efficient and concise platform.

Challenges we ran into

One of our main challenges was incorporating 3D interactive maps using Mapbox to make the app more engaging and user-friendly. Another hurdle was ensuring smooth communication between the frontend and backend, which involved a lot of troubleshooting to get everything working seamlessly. The tight deadline also added to the pressure, but through persistence and teamwork, we were able to overcome these obstacles and deliver a working app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re incredibly proud of creating a functional app that makes it easier for students to connect and collaborate. The app not only meets its goals but also presents course and building information in a simple, easy-to-use way. Additionally, this project helped us deepen our understanding of tools like Next.js and MongoDB, skills we’re excited to carry forward into future projects.

What we learned

This project was a huge learning experience for us. We gained a great amount of hands-on experience, such as creating responsive interfaces using Next.js, setting up interactive maps with Mapbox, creating and managing backend endpoints with Express.js and integrating and optimizing databases using MongoDB. It also helped us improve our problem-solving and collaboration skills, which are just as important as the technical knowledge we gained.

What's next for Study Crawl

Although we are very proud of everything we achieved, there is still room for improvement that we can work on in the future. We’re excited to keep improving "Study Crawl" even after the hackathon ends and some of the ideas we’d like to implement next include but are not limited to a group chat feature for each study group, personalized suggestions based on each student’s schedule and location, real-time notifications for study session updates and user-authentication for the sack of safety. These additions would make the app even more useful and help it reach a wider audience.