College Unlocked

Your one stop shop to choosing the college right for you!

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🌐 Domain Name: https://college-unlocked.tech/
Gitbook API Documentation

☁️ Inspiration

So many people have trouble finding the right college. They wonder, what majors does the college offer? Is my GPA good enough? How much does it cost? Then, they waste their time writing essay after essay to maximize the chance of getting into their preferred college. We wanted to change that by making an application which helps people find the perfect college for them. This application is especially suitable for hackers as they are occupied with coding, and it takes a lot of time to search through numerous computer science colleges to find the right match.

🚧 What It Does

Our application helps people unlock college, by giving them the advice and tools they need to find a perfect college. Our app allows them to talk to real people and get real feedback. It has a very use friendly UI and allows anyone and everyone to find a college.

👨🏾‍💻 How We Built It

For the frontend, we made the styles using Figma and exported them to React components, then integrating with the backend. For the frontend, we used React and a wrapper around it called NextJS. This allowed us to utilize performance techniques such as client side and server side rendering overall optimizing our application. We used fetch requests to communicate with our backend for this full stack application. We also used Tailwind CSS for its helpful utility classes as the team did not have much experience with CSS. The backend used many different technologies:

  • Core Server: flask as it's a very easy framework to use and is highly extensible.
  • Hosting and Database: replit as it has free unlimited hosting and it's database is big.
  • Text Engine: markdown2html as more hackers use markdown so it appeals to them.
  • File Storage: Deso as it provides better security.
  • College Data Set: Kaggle as it has very trustable datasets.
  • Hardware: Digi-Key (arduino) as it's very fun and easy to use, giving us a lot of control over sensors.
  • Collaboration, Issues, and Much More: Github. We were able to cooperate effectively, share our work, and do so while also saving time and money. This was also great way to keep everything transparent to anyone using our product as they have the ability to view our source code. We also utilized GitHub repositories to store our code, allowing us to track our development using version control and revert to previous versions if required. We utilized GitHub's Codespaces to collaborate on a public server while developing our College Finder API. We adopted GitHub copilot to speed up our development and was able to produc results 10x faster. Pull requests and issues are two of GitHub's greatest features. We were able to keep track of all the code bugs using GitHub's issues system and resolve them afterwards.

👷 Challenges We Ran Into

We ran into many challenges. At the start of the hackathon, we ran into problems relating to the navigation bar that was malfunctioning due to third party libraries, styling, and other factors. We worked through the issues and developed a more simplistic version of the navigation bar and were able to complete the challenge successfully. On the backend also, we ran into several issues. Many of the problems were due to the markdown2html engine. We also had to learn Arduino for the first time, which was much different than simply writing code ha ha ha...after that it was smooth sailing!

🎉 Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

We actually finished the application with all functionalities...woo hoo 🥳! Learning hardware is a big achievement for us. It was the first time, and we learned how to use the several different sensors that came with the arduino. On top of that, we learned how to convert markdown to HTML and style it. In the midst of all this, we also learned how to effectively use Github's many features to our advantage. We are very proud of making a product that would help make a change in this world.

📙 What We Learned

We learned many things. This included Tailwind CSS as we made our application very aesthetic and user friendly through our styling. We learned how to optimize our project better. We also learned axios to communicate with the backend faster and with an easier ease of use. On the backend, we learned countless different things, the biggest one being Github. On top of learning hardware, we integrated many different libraries. While we used Deso before, implementing it on a web server, in python, was complicated. On top of that, we learned how to use replit db. We learned a lot about using GitHub, especially their issue system. On top of that, Copilot and Codespaces helped a ton.

🔜 What's Next For College Unlocked

  • Better Predictions
  • Larger Dataset
  • More Styles
  • More Options For Predictions
  • Different Languages

🌎 How College Unlocked Changes The World

This application impacts many people. First, student debt is at an all-time high in many places. Having the ability to make a true decision based on cost, budget, and more can help you prevent yourself from getting into debt. Second, having advice from other users can empower students to know what the culture and identity of the school is. With this, we can change the world.

😃 To The Organizers

Thank you to all the hackathon organizers who helped develop these individual hackathons. Through workshops, lessons and other factors, our team was able to make a fantastic product that we are proud of. We hope you like it too!

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