Inspiration
Our inspiration was the physical Turlington Plaza on campus that promotes club advertisement. We especially wanted to replicate tabling in a more accessible manner.
What it does
Virtual Turlington has both a student and club side. For the student side, you can view clubs that are currently "tabling" on the homepage, or search clubs through name, tags, meeting day/times, and more. On the club side, clubs can add their organization to the website through a handy form that takes in basic club info, and clubs can apply to be on the home "tabling" page for a set amount of time. A maximum of 6 clubs can appear on the home "tabling" page at a time.
How we built it
Virtual Turlington is a MERN + P stack (Mongo, Express, React, Node.js, Python). The searching and matching algorithm is written in Python. The club information is stored in a Cloud Based MongoDB atlas server, which is then accessed by the backed through mongoose. The backend provides API endpoints using Express, which the React App calls to get data that populates the app.
Challenges we ran into
As a group, this was our first time using Github on such a large scale so problems were naturally going to arise. For starters, about an hour and a half got spent trying to understand how an important default package (json package) vanished from the repository. Additionally, merging visual aspects at the end required the team to discuss differences in our code and make decisions that affected the entire visual style of the app. Additionally, one issue we ran into early on was having our python search algorithm communicate with our Node.js backend. We solved this through cleverly utilizing the file structure of the project and taking advantage of the flexibility of Node.js.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very proud about how well all of the various components of this project communicate. Whenever the app is accessed the React app is first sent out. This app communicates with the API, which then communicates with a Python script and a MongoDB database to gather and analyze information regarding users and clubs. This communication was difficult, but very rewarding. We are also very proud of the visual presentation of the app. The logo and banner that we created for this project perfectly matched the simple, but effective, design we were hoping to achieve.
What we learned
How to effectively use Github as a team, especially when having to fix mistakes, and how to effectively communicate what we are making and providing to the team.
What's next for Virtual Turlington
As Computer Science/Engineering students, we are excited to continue developing technically and professionally to create more applications to solve problems in the future.
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