Inspiration
Each year, over 2,100 Tar Heels study abroad and explore different countries, experiencing diverse cultures and educational opportunities worldwide. However, some students find the current HeelsAbroad platform to be less intuitive for researching programs. This difficulty inspired our team to create a user-friendly website designed to help UNC students discover their perfect study abroad destination. One of our team members experienced firsthand how overwhelming it was to research and decide on a program, and another is a current exchange student, which motivated us even further. Our solution is an interactive and dynamic world map that provides necessary information for each study abroad program, simplifying the process and helping students make the best traveling choices.
What it does
Tar Travel is an interactive study abroad platform designed to make exploring global opportunities easy and engaging for UNC students. Tar Travel features a world map filled with interactive pins. Each pin represents a different study abroad program, and when clicked, displays detailed information on the sidebar. This sidebar contains program details, including the name, location, description, an image of the host school, and a direct link for further information.
To help students customize their search, Tar Travel includes a dropdown filter that allows users to tailor their views based on specific preferences. Students can filter programs by type--such as exchange programs, summer programs, direct enrollment options, internships, and budget-friendly choices. This ensures that every user can find a program that matches their academic needs, schedule, and budget.
Our user-friendly and interactive design streamlines the often overwhelming process of researching and choosing an abroad program. With detailed, accessible information at their fingertips, students can make well-informed decisions and easily plan their academic journey abroad.
How we built it
For the frontend, we utilized React.js to create a dynamic and responsive user interface. The interactive world map was implemented using Leaflet, providing students with a visually appealing and easy-to-navigate map experience. For designs and animations, we used a combination of CSS for styling and React Icons for enhanced visual components.
The backend was powered by Python alongside Beautiful Soup for webscraping, allowing us to gather and process data efficiently. To manage and manipulate data, we integrated Pandas for data handling and Selenium for automating data collection from interactive websites.
Challenges we ran into
Web scraping our data from heels abroad proved a challenge as the website was dynamically loaded and did not have a fixed format.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
As beginners, we were able to develop a complete web application from scratch. Creating a tool with the potential to benefit the entire student body is an achievement that exceeded our initial expectations.
What we learned
The development of Tar Travel taught all of us invaluable lessons about teamwork and developing a full-stack application from start to finish. We learned how to effectively collaborate in a team setting, utilizing Git and GitHub to manage conflicts. The project deepened not only our technical knowledge
What's next for Tar Travel
Tar Travel has shown to be an invaluable tool when researching different programs and has great potential to become widely used by students. Additionally, we plan on developing a mobile app to provide users with on-the-go access to Tar Travel. We want to make Tar Travel the go-to platform for UNC students to choose their ideal abroad experience confidently.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.