Group Sync

Group sync allows students to sync their classes to create times to meet and study

Comment

Inspiration

Scheduling conflicts are extremely common in student life, we each have our own preference of calendar apps, and there never seems to be any simple and accessible way to sync all of our availabilities.

What it does

Group Sync gets class information using the Canvas API providing students a platform to schedule study sessions, reviews, etc. Students save their availability and can friend other classmates to create "study groups" which are then able to schedule events depending on Student availability.

How we built it

We used the Google Cloud Compute Engine to make a Debian VM to host our MongoDB database and local Canvas instance, our front end was build using Svelte to connect to Google Cloud and to the Canvas API.

Challenges we ran into

Learning how to integrate MongoDB with Svelte and Canvas with the Google Cloud VM was our largest hurdle, we had to rebuild our VM twice due to our initial disk lacking sufficient space and cores to host the local Canvas instance and our Database. We had to completely rebuild our database due to issues with access control completely disrupting the build process.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud coming together as a team with vastly different backgrounds and actually connecting each of our own individual contributions to the whole project. Our front end is reactive and is able to update and get user info from our database. Our back end is running on our second attempt at making a Debian Server on a Google Cloud VM, which for the better part of the last 24 hour was barely functional.

What we learned

Each of us got to really dive into software that we've never seen before. No one on our team had had prior experience using Google Cloud so using it's VM to host our Database and Canvas instance was a huge hurdle for all of us to tackle.

What's next for Group Sync

What's next?

  • We plan to fully integrate Canvas into our database, we will need to request developer access from our University to test our project with actual classroom data.
  • Our front end has a complete Figma Wireframe to implement and make Group Sync really pop!
  • Currently, we pull data from a premade data set, we plan to pull assignment and exam data from canvas and integrate a machine learning algorithm to automatically plan events for students in preparation for classwork like exams and big projects
Share this project:

Updates