Inspiration
In our experience of taking classes here at UCLA, we often found ourselves with the need to form study groups with our classmates. The problem is, most people do this via Facebook, texting each other, or simply talking to each other in class. The fact that many classes have a large amount of people only adds to the hassle of the student trying to find study buddies. That's why we decided to tackle this problem head-on with an Android app that serves as a central platform for Bruins to search and form study groups.
What it does
Study Match allows a student to find study groups by first searching a class by subject and class number. This brings up a list of existing study groups which displays each of the groups' names, members, and regular meetup times to the student. The list also contains any study groups that the student has already joined. The student can tap on these groups and enter their group dashboards, where it is possible to view further information about the group and request to join a group as well.
In the event that there are no existing groups for a class or the student cannot find any groups that fit their schedule, we will soon implement the functionality to allow them to create a group themselves as well! (See future plans for more info)
How we built it
Since we originally intended to mainly focus on building an iOS app, initially we used the Swift language in the Xcode IDE. However, due to the circumstances, we pivoted to building an Android app instead and used Java and XML to implement the application in the Android Studio IDE. For creating the design mockups that you can see in our gallery, we used the Figma web app.
Challenges we ran into
We originally intended to mainly focus on building an iOS app. My teammates left during the middle of the hackathon, however. Combined with the fact that I did not have a Mac, I was forced to use the time as best as I could and code an Android version of the app from scratch, based on the ideas we already had for the iOS app. Due to the pivot, I was not able to introduce further improvements to the app, such as integration with Facebook or any alternative form of logon using APIs, or implementing the functionality to add a group.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I completed the implementation of a prototype application for Android after the second half of the hackathon as a solo effort, due to the circumstances described previously. Although the interface and design were less than ideal due to the time constraints, it still felt like a great accomplishment creating a working demo version of the app by myself in that short amount of time.
What we learned
I learned a great deal of building multi-activity Android applications, as I was accustomed to building single-activity applications in the past in personal tinkering or through the ACM Hack School. Participating at this hackathon and building this project allowed me to step outside of my comfort zone and learn to tackle coding problems head-on.
What's next for Study Match
As previously mentioned, we'd like to use the Facebook API to facilitate logging on to the application, or perhaps even using UCLA's Shiboleth authentication. This enables a more streamlined user authentication and management system.
We'd also like to implement a functionality to allow users to create a new group, in the event that there are no existing groups for a class or the student cannot find any groups that fit their schedule.
Other nice features to add would be a quick dashboard page for the user to view all the groups they joined on a single page instead of seeing them show up in searches, and also adding more courses to our database, as currently we only have Computer Science courses.
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